In this paper, Proxy Mobile IPv6 (PMIPv6), which is a network-based mobility management protocol, is adapted to the OpenFlow architecture. Mobility-related signaling is generally performed by network entities on behalf of a mobile node, but in standard PMIPv6, the control and data packets are delivered and processed over the same network entities, which prevents the separation of the control and the data planes. In addition, IP tunneling inherent to PMIPv6 imposes excessive overhead for the network entities. In order to adapt PMIPv6 to the OpenFlow architecture, the mobility management function is separated from the PMIPv6 components, and components are reconstructed to take advantage of the offerings of the OpenFlow architecture. The components configure the flow table of the switches located in a path, which comprise the OpenFlow controller. Mobility-related signaling can then be performed at the dedicated secure channel, and all of the data packets can be sent normally in accordance with the flow table of the OpenFlow switches. Consequently, the proposed scheme eliminates IP tunneling when user traffic is forwarded and separates the data and the control planes. The performance analysis revealed that the proposed scheme can outperform PMIPv6 in terms of the signaling cost, packet delivery cost, and handover latency.

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).

This study proposes an integrated technology based on Proxy Mobile IPv6, which is a network-based protocol with mobility support, and a mobile content delivery network (CDN) that provides efficient content delivery management. The proposed architecture offers several benefits, such as the conservation of network resources because of reduced total traffic between hops and a reduced hop count.

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.

Proxy Mobile IPv6 (PMIPv6) is proposed as a new network-based local mobility protocol which does not involve the Mobile Node (MN) in mobility management. PMIPv6, which uses link-layer attachment information, reduces the movement detection time and eliminates duplicate address detection procedures in order to provide faster handover than Mobile IPv6 (MIPv6). To eliminate packet loss during the handover period, the Local Mobility Anchor (LMA) buffering scheme is proposed. In this scheme, the LMA buffers lost packets of the Mobile Access Gateway (MAG) and the MN during the handover and recovers them after handover. A new Automatic Repeat reQuest (ARQ) handler is defined which efficiently manages the LMA buffer. The ARQ handler relays ARQ result between the MAG and the MN to the LMA. The LMA removes any buffered packets which have been successfully delivered to the MN. The ARQ handler recovers the packet loss during the handover using buffered packets in the LMA. The ARQ information, between the MAG and LMA, is inserted in the outer header of IP-in-IP encapsulated packets of a standard PMIPv6 tunnel. Since the proposed scheme simply adds information to the standard operation of an IP-in-IP tunnel between the LMA and the MAG, it can be implemented seamlessly without modification to the original PMIPv6 messages and signaling sequence. Unlike other Fast Handovers for Mobile IPv6 (FMIPv6) based enhancement for PMIPv6, the proposed scheme does not require any handover related information before the actual handover.

In future mobile networks, the ever-increasing loads imposed by mobile Internet traffic will force the network architecture to be changed from hierarchical to flat structure. Most of the existing mobility protocols are based on a centralized mobility anchor, which will process all control and data traffic. In the flat network architecture, however, the centralized mobility scheme has some limitations, such as unwanted traffic flowing into the core network, service degradation by a single point of failure, and increased operational costs, etc. This paper proposes mobility schemes for distributed mobility control in the flat network architecture. Based on the Proxy Mobile IPv6 (PMIP), which is a well-known mobility protocol, we propose the three mobility schemes: Signal-driven PMIP (S-PMIP), Data-driven Distributed PMIP (DD-PMIP), and Signal-driven Distributed PMIP (SD-PMIP). By numerical analysis, we show that the proposed distributed mobility schemes can give better performance than the existing centralized scheme in terms of the binding update and packet delivery costs, and that SD-PMIP provides the best performance among the proposed distributed schemes.

In PMIPv6, all packets sent by mobile nodes or correspondent nodes are transferred through the local mobility anchor. This unnecessary detour results in high delivery latency and significant processing cost. Several PMIPv6 route optimization schemes have been proposed to solve this issue. However, they also suffer from the high signaling costs when determining the optimized path. The proposed scheme which adopts the prediction algorithm in PFMIPv6 can reduce the signaling costs of the previous schemes. Analytical performance evaluation is performed to show the effectiveness of the proposed scheme.

In Proxy Mobile IPv6 (PMIPv6), when a Mobile Node (MN) enters a PMIPv6 domain and attaches to an access link, the router on the access link detects attachment of the MN by the link-layer access. All elements of PMIPv6 including the router then provide network-based mobility management service for the MN. If the MN moves to another router in this PMIPv6 domain, the new router emulates attachment to the previous router by providing same network prefix to the MN. In other words, PMIPv6 provides rapid mobility management based on layer-2 attachment and transparent mobility support to the MN by emulating layer-3 attachment with respect to intra-domain roaming. However, when the MN moves to other PMIPv6 domains, although the domains also provide the network-based mobility management service, the MN should exploit the host-based mobility management protocol, i.e. Mobile IPv6 (MIPv6), for the inter-domain roaming. Hence, this letter proposes the rapid and transparent inter-domain roaming mechanism controlled by the networks adopting PMIPv6.

Proxy Mobile IPv6 (PMIPv6) has been proposed in order to overcome the limitations of host-based mobility management in IPv6 networks. However, packet losses during doing handover are still a problem. To solve this issue, several schemes have been developed, and can be classified into two approaches: predictive and reactive handover. Both approaches commonly use bi-directional tunnel between mobile access gateways (MAGs). In predictive schemes especially, mobility support for a mobile node (MN) is triggered by simplified link signal strength. Thereafter, the MN sends handover notification to its serving MAG, and is then able to initiate packet forwarding. Therefore, if the MN moves toward an unexpected MAG that does not have any pre-established tunnel with the serving MAG, it may lead to packet losses. In this paper, we define this problem as Early Packet Forwarding (EPF). As a solution, we propose an enhanced PMIPv6 scheme using two-phase tunnel control based on the IEEE 802.21 Media Independent Handover (MIH).

Packet delivery in Proxy Mobile IPv6 (PMIPv6) relies on an anchor node called LMA. All packets sent by a source node reach a receiver node via LMA, even though the two nodes attach to the same MAG. In some scenarios, PMIPv6 results in high delivery latency and processing costs due to this unnecessary detour. To address this issue, several PMIPv6 route optimization schemes have been proposed. However, high signaling costs and excessive delays remain when handover is performed. For this reason, we propose an enhanced PMIPv6 route optimization (EPRO) scheme. In addition, we analyze the performance of the EPRO. Analytical results indicate that the EPRO outperforms previous schemes in terms of signaling overhead and handover latency.

Proxy Mobile IPv6 (PMIPv6) is designed not only to avoid tunneling overhead over the air but also to manage the mobility of hosts that are not equipped with any mobility management software. However, PMIPv6 leads to increasing signaling cost as mobile nodes move frequently because the protocol is based on the global mobility management protocol. In this letter we propose Localized PMIPv6 with Route Optimization (LPMIPv6-RO). Our numerical analysis shows that the proposed scheme outperforms previously proposed mobility protocols in terms of both signaling and packet delivery cost.