DMAM: distributed mobility and authentication mechanism in next generation networks

Traditional centralized approaches toward mobility management such as MIPv6 and its variants suffer because of the performance issues like single-point failure, non-optimal routing, low scalability, authentication latency, and signaling messages overhead of the mobility protocols. In this paper, we propose a novel network-based Distributed Mobility and Authentication Mechanism (DMAM) to focus on these issues. DMAM decomposes centralized mobility functions into Home Address Allocation, mobility routing (MR), and location management (LM). A new entity is introduced in DMAM, called Location and Mobility Manager that distributes MR and LM among multiple routers to which mobile node can be attached. Furthermore, DMAM offers strong authentication mechanism based on symmetric cryptographic and collision-free one-way hash function. The performance of proposed scheme is analyzed and compared with existing approaches in terms of handover latency, handover blocking probability, packet loss, communication overhead, and computational cost. The conducted numerical results demonstrate that DMAM outperforms the existing approaches. Copyright (c) 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.