Mobility Agent Location Optimization in all-IP based Wireless Access Networks

Agent based micro-mobility protocols such as Hierarchical Mobile IPv6 deploy special IPv6 nodes called Mobility Agents that act as an anchor point between the Mobile Node and the Home Agent providing localized mobility support. The location and the number of MAs deployed within the network can affect the performance of the protocol. This paper deals with the problem of Mobility Agent (MA) location and assignments of Access Router to MAs. We first analyze the significant impact that the MA location has on the routing and mobility overhead cost. We subsequently formulate the handover overhead and routing costs and perform numerical investigations to obtain the effect of MA location on these costs. The investigations show that the MA location has a considerable effect on these costs and to ensure optimal performance of the network and the micromobility solution it is imperative that the MAs are placed in the optimal locations that minimise the handover and routing overhead costs.