Mathematical Analysis of Signaling Overhead in MIPv6 Based N-Layer Architecture

IP based wireless mobile networks are of great importance now-a-days to users on the move. To provide connectivity to mobile users with same IP address despite of their change in location or point of attachment, the location information of mobile users must be kept up to date. Managing location information of such users basically needs information to be exchanged between different network entities. The transmission of such messages consumes bandwidth, incurred processing time and transmission cost. This cost is normally referred as signaling overhead caused by mobile users. The signaling overhead is mainly dependent on the frequency of location change caused by the movement of users and number of messages to be exchange to complete the location update process. Hierarchical arrangement of anchor agents can reduce such signaling overhead but degrades scalability in presence of large number of mobile users. The objective of this work is to analyze mathematically the location update frequency and cost in an N layered hierarchical architecture for IPv6 based network in wireless environment. The intention is to find optimal levels of hierarchy in terms of frequency and cost of location update to suggest a scalable IPv6 based mobile architecture. Result obtained from mathematical calculation shows that three levels architecture may provide optimal values for these two performance parameters. Keyword: HMIPv6, Mathematical Modeling, Performance Analysis, Signaling cost.