A unified MIPv6 and PMIPv6 route optimization scheme for heterogeneous mobility management domains

Nowadays more and more wireless users are on move while accessing the Internet, and providing mobility support in IP networks has been a long-standing challenge. Client-based Mobile IPv6 (MIPv6) is the most widely known mobility management scheme, and fast emerging Proxy-based Mobile IPv6 (PMIPv6) scheme offers an alternative. However, some inherent problems such as route optimization in these schemes have not been totally solved. Although various proposals tried to tackle the route optimization problem, none of them has achieved a satisfactory success. Furthermore, most of them are not a comprehensive solution for coexisting MIPv6/PMIPv6 mobility environments. In this paper, we propose a unified approach to Route Optimization (RO) scheme based on a simplified MIPv6 Return Routability Procedure (RRP) protocol, called Traffic Driven Pseudo Binding Update (TDPBU), which can significantly improve the overall performance of mobility management schemes. Our proposed scheme can ensure immediate route optimization, regardless the heterogeneous MIPv6/PMIPv6 environment in which the MNs reside. Simulation results show that TDPBU can improve the performance in terms of the end-to-end latency, signaling cost, throughput, route optimization latency, route optimization blocking rate, and power consumption compared to original MIPv6 with RRP mechanism. Besides, the deployment cost and software complexity of both network entities and clients, are expected reduction. 2014 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.