The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) has been actively standardizing distributed mobility management (DMM) schemes with multiple Mobility Anchors (MAs). Yet, all existing schemes have limitations that preclude the efficient distribution of mobile data traffic, including single point failure problems, heavy tunneling overheads between MAs, and a restrictive traffic distribution for external nodes in a mobility domain. Therefore, this paper proposes an efficient mobility management scheme with a virtual Local Mobility Anchor (vLMA). While the vLMA is designed assuming multiple replicated LMAs for a PMIPv6 domain, it acts virtually as a single LMA for the internal and external nodes in the PMIPv6 domain. Furthermore, the vLMA distributes mobile data traffic using replicated LMAs, and routes packets via a replicated LMA on the optimal routing path. Performance evaluations confirm that the proposed scheme can distribute mobile data traffic more efficiently and reduce the end-to-end packet delay than the Distributed Local Mobility Anchor (DLMA) and the Proxy Mobile IPv6 (PMIPv6).

Proxy Mobile IPv6 (PMIPv6) is a network-based localized mobility management protocol that is independent of global mobility management protocols. In a single local mobility domain, the mobile node (MN) is not involved in any IP mobility-related signaling, but when the MN moves into another local mobility domain, the MN must change its PMIPv6 home address. In this case, host-based mobility signaling is activated, and PMIPv6's network-based mobility cannot be retained. Additionally, if the MN does not support global mobility, it cannot maintain its communication sessions with its correspondent node. In this paper, we propose a solution for network-based global mobility support in PMIPv6 networks, which allows the MN to maintain active communication sessions without mobility protocol stacks when the MN moves into another local mobility domain. In the proposed mechanism, the MN remains unaware of its movement when it moves to another local mobility domain, and it is forced to use only its MIPv6 home address for all its communication. Thus, the MN is not involved in any IP mobility-related signaling, despite its movement. The proposed protocol provides for global mobility while retaining the advantages of the network-based localized mobility in the Proxy Mobile IPv6 protocol. In this paper, we propose a solution for global mobility support in PMIPv6 networks by which the MAG (Mobile Access Gateway) can maintain the MN's communication sessions during inter-domain handover. In the proposed mechanism, the MN remains unaware of its movement when it moves to another local mobility domain, and it is forced to use only its MIPv6 home address for all its communication. Thus, the MN is not involved in any IP mobility-related signaling, despite its movement. We evaluate and compare network performance between our proposed solution and PMIPv6 and the main host-based mobility protocol. We evaluate and compare handover delays, and packet loss cost of the two protocols.

PMIPv6 is the IETF standard for a network-based localized mobility management protocol. In PMIPv6, MNs are topologically anchored at an LMA, which forwards all data for registered MNs. However, since all data packets destined for MNs always traverse the MNs' LMA, the end-to-end packet delay is increased. Therefore, this paper proposes an RO scheme in single and multiple LMA environments. For efficient RO possibility detection, an IPv6 RO extension header and initial RO procedure are proposed. Plus, an effective post-handover RO procedure is presented, along with a packet forwarding scheme to avoid the race condition problem during an RO operation. A Performance evaluation confirms that the proposed scheme can significantly reduce the end-to-end delay, signaling overhead, and RO latency when compared with existing RO schemes.