Studying the integration of distributed and dynamic schemes in the mobility management

The raise of demanding multimedia content and the increasing number of mobile devices originated a rapid growth of mobile Internet traffic, which is expected to continue increasing with an exponential behavior in the next years. In order to cope with this rapid increase, service providers are already developing new strategies, such as the selective traffic offloading through the wireless local area networks. Moreover, a new trend is to flatten the network architectures for mobile Internet, and hence, IP mobility management protocols need to be adapted for such evolution. However, current mobility management models rely on a centralized entity, called mobility anchor, which routes the whole data traffic and manages all bindings of its users. With the increase of the mobile Internet traffic and the number of users’ devices, such centralized models encounter several barriers for scalability, security and performance, such as a single point of failure, longer traffic delays and higher signaling loads. Hence, we study the distribution of mobility management based on the decoupling of functionalities into: handover management, location management and data management. We evaluate distinct approaches to distribute the mobility functionalities closer to the end-user. We demonstrate, through analytical and simulation results, that distributed mobility management approaches improve the data delivery when compared with current centralized models. 2013 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.