Toward a Hierarchical Mobile IPv6

The IETF Mobile IPv6 protocol provides a mobility management scheme for the Internet. Mobile IPv6 handles macro-mobility and micro-mobility identically. We believe that a hierarchical scheme that separates micro-mobility from macromobility is preferable since it would be more scalable. In this paper, we present a mobility management architecture that makes use of the IPv6 Address format hierarchy to provide an efficient and scalable architecture to manage mobility in the Internet. The proposed scheme, which is fully compatible with the IETF solution, differentiates the inter-site mobility management from the intra-site mobility management. The hosts’ local mobility is handled with a local, possibly customized, protocol while the global mobility, i.e. across sites, is handled with Mobile IPv6. Our approach has two main advantages. First, the mobility of a host within a site is fully transparent to its correspondent nodes. As a result, the mobility management signaling load is minimized and some of Mobile IPv6 security issues are solved. We show that the signaling load generated by our proposal is at least 69% lower than the Mobile IPv6 one. Second, by differentiating intra-site mobility from inter-site mobility, we provide an architecture that is hierarchical, scalable, flexible and customizable; each site can deploy the intra-site mobility management scheme that is the most appropriate to its particular needs.