Performance analysis of virtual layer handoff scheme based on MAP changing in HMIPv6 networks

In IP-based wireless/mobile networks, mobility support is one of the most critical issues. Hierarchical Mobile IPv6 (HMIPv6) was proposed by Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) to mitigate the high signaling overhead in Mobile IPv6 networks when mobile nodes (MNs) perform frequent hand-offs. Although the standardization process of the HMIPv6 specification has been almost completed in IETF, there are a number of challenging issues related to HMIPv6 networks. In this paper, we propose a hierarchical mobility management scheme which reduces signaling traffic for location updates by employing Virtual Mobility Anchor Point (VMAP) on top of original Mobility Anchor Point (MAP) domain in HMIPv6. It is certain that our scheme uses the network resources efficiently by removing the global binding updates for MNs in boundary ARs inside MAP domain. In conclusion, our proposed scheme greatly reduces the packet loss and delay by eliminating Inter-MAP handoff.