A study of multimedia application performance over Multiple Care-of Addresses in Mobile IPv6

Mobile and multi-access devices have become commonplace today. In this context, nodes have multiple interfaces that can form the foundation for the always best connected paradigm. Mobile IPv6, the staple mobility management technology for the Internet, enables nodes to roam between different networks while minimising session disruption due to handovers. However, in standard MIPv6, a mobile node can register only a single IP address as its Care-of-Address (CoA), therefore the multiplicity of network interfaces may be managed suboptimally while simultaneous multi-access is not possible. Recently, MIPv6 has been extended with a much-anticipated feature, namely Multiple Care-of Address (MCoA) registration. MCoA allows a MIPv6 node to register all active addresses configured on the respective interfaces and then use them at will, possibly in an alternating fashion as well as simultaneously. MCoA is anticipated to improve the performance of multimedia applications, yet this is still to be quantified. This paper provides a first answer to this question. In particular, we employ simulation to evaluate the benefits for multimedia applications, such as VoIP and video, from the use of MCoA. We compare the MCoA results with those obtained when MIPv6 with single address registration is used based on objective multimedia evaluation metrics, such as PESQ. In addition we examine the tradeoffs between application benefits and signaling costs for the network.