A novel user-centric handoff cost framework applied to the Virtual Mobility Domains and IPv6-based mobility protocols

The mobile user population connected to the Internet continues to grow in number and hence provisioning seamless Internet service to such user is a topic of major interest. With new mobility architectures being investigated, it is important to have consistent comparative platforms and metrics. In this article, we introduce a novel and user-centric handoff cost framework to analyze handoff performance of different mobility schemes. The proposed framework helps examine the impacts of registration costs, signaling overhead, and data loss for Internet connected mobile users employing a unified cost metric. We first applied the framework to our future Internet mobility architecture, called Virtual Mobility Domains (VMDs). This architecture is user centric as it allows mobile users to avail services from overlapping mobility domains based on their mobility profiles. Next, the framework is applied to IPv6-based mobility protocols such as Hierarchical Mobile IPv6 and Proxy Mobile IPv6 to show the framework´s flexibility and adaptability. Using the framework, we compare the handoff performance of IPv6-based mobility protocols to the VMD based mobility scheme. The results indicate that the handoff performance achieved with VMD is three and nine times superior to Proxy Mobile IPv6 and Hierarchical Mobile IPv6 respectively.