A performance comparison of mobility anchor point selection schemes in Hierarchical Mobile IPv6 networks

Hierarchical Mobile IPv6 (HMIPv6) introduces a mobility anchor point (MAP) that localizes the signaling traffic and hence reduces the handoff latency. In addition to processing binding update messages from mobile nodes (MNs) on behalf of MNs’ home agents (HAs), the MAP performs data traffic tunneling destined to or originated from MNs, both of which will burden the MAP substantially as the network size grows. To provide scalable and robust mobile Internet services to a large number of visiting MNs, multiple MAPs will be deployed. In such an environment, how to select an appropriate MAP has a vital effect on the overall network performance. In this paper, we choose four MAP selection schemes: the furthest MAP selection scheme, the nearest MAP selection scheme, the mobility-based MAP selection scheme, and the adaptive MAP selection scheme. Then, we compare their performances quantitatively in terms of signaling overhead and load balancing. It can be shown that the dynamic schemes (i.e., the mobility-based and the adaptive MAP selection schemes) are better than the static schemes (i.e., the furthest and the nearest MAP selection schemes), since the dynamic schemes can select the serving MAP depending on the MN’s characteristics, e.g., mobility and session activity. In addition, the adaptive MAP selection scheme achieves low implementation overhead and better load balancing compared with the mobility-based MAP selection scheme. 2006 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.