Analytical and Experimental Evaluation of Handovers in IPv6 Mobility Management Protocols

Mobile data traffic in the Internet has experienced an exponential growth due to the widespread presence of multimedia capable mobile devices and the deployment of multiple wireless networks. With this continuous development of mobile communications, the achievement of an efficient IP mobility management protocol has revealed as one of the major challenges in next-generation wireless networks. Mobility management solutions are responsible for maintaining the ongoing communications while the user roams among distinct networks. Mobile IPv6 and Proxy Mobile IPv6 are the most representative solutions standardized by the IETF. Recently, the IPv6 mobility support has been newly integrated into the kernel sources and Linux mobility ready kernels are available from versions 3.8.1. In this paper, we conduct an analytic and experimental evaluation of Mobile IPv6 and Proxy Mobile IPv6. We develop an analytic model of the signaling and handover latency. Moreover, we present an experimental study of these protocols based on their open source implementations. We provide numerical results based on experiments made in real scenarios under different network conditions.