Performance analysis of Mobile IPv6 support for Dual Stack hosts

Mobile communications services have become an integral part of everyone´s life mainly by facilities provided in the exchange of information for mobile users independent of time, location, or access arrangement. In this context, the mobility management with seamless handover is crucial to provide rich communication services to mobile users. Mobile IPv4 (MIPv4) and IPv6 (MIPv6) and its extensions were proposed by IETF for IP layer mobility management. Nowadays, most access networks run IPv4 as its network protocol. However, IPv6 usage is moving forward and mechanisms are required to ensure mobility management and roaming between IPv4 and IPv6 access networks. In this paper, we analyze the performance of Dual Stack Mobile IPv6 (DSMIPv6) when the mobile node is roaming to different IPv4 and IPv6 networks. We investigate the signaling procedures and messages format under different handoff scenarios to derive the mobility management signaling cost. We propose an analytical model that is capable to derive the signaling cost overhead, disruption time latency and average packet loss based on node mobility and user traffic patterns. Numerical results are also presented to better understand the system performance under different traffic and mobility scenarios. From the analysis derived in this work it is possible to better understand the performance of DSMIPv6 and identify the signaling overhead under different roaming scenarios.