Performance Evaluation of Hop-by-Hop Local Mobility Agents Probing for Mobile IPv6

Mobile IPv6 (MIPv6) and Fast Handover (FHO) have been developed by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) to address the IP mobility issues of roaming mobile devices, and to reduce handover latency due to link switching delay, movement detection and IP address configuration during MIPv6 operation, respectively. In an attempt to enhance the performance of MIPv6, the Hop-byHop Local Mobility Agents Probing (HbH-LMAsP) Localized Mobility Management (LMM) scheme was devised and proposed to IETF as an internet draft. In this paper, simulations that were performed on MIPv6 and subsequently, on MIPv6 with the addition of the HbHLMAsP (with and without FHO) functionality, were described. The results obtained based on registration delay, packet loss, and the overhead computation, were analyzed and discussed. The improvements contributed by the HbH-LMAsP LMM scheme over the basic Mobile IPv6 were shown to be significant. The discussion on load balancing was also covered.