Study of the Anchor Point Arrangement Policy in Mobile WiMAX Networks

In order to provide efficient handover (HO) of end to end connections, the cross IP/MAC layer design is proposed in this paper to integrate the procedures of hierarchical mobile IPv6 (HMIPv6) and the original WiMAX mobility. From the practical implementation point of view, the mobility anchor point (MAP) of HMIPv6 can be collocated either with the ASN gateway or CSN. In this paper, the message sequence flows for the integration of above scenarios are deeply analyzed. The quantitative comparisons, in terms of control messages overhead and handover delay, are performed. Analytical results show that ASN anchored mobility has the lowest handoff delay at the cost of establishing and maintaining extra data paths. And this cost could cause ASN-GW overloaded, which will degrade the traffic forwarding quality, owing to the large amount of data path establishment. Thus a tradeoff shall be considered between the handover latency and the network load.