Location management using mobile history for Hierarchical Mobile IPv6 networks

Hierarchical Mobile IPv6 (HMIPv6) has been proposed to improve the performance capability of Mobile IPv6 at handover. In HMIPv6, local entities named Mobility Anchor Points (MAPs) are distributed throughout a network to localize the management of intra-domain mobility. In particular, multi-layered MAP has been proposed to improve performance. MAPs reduce the number of Binding Updates to the Home Agent and improve the communication quality at handover. These conventional methods that manage a multi-layered MAP cannot, however, select an appropriate MAP because they use the virtual mobility speed. As a result, they increase the signaling traffic in a multi-layered MAP. Moreover, they may cause the load to concentrate at a specific MAP. In this paper, we propose a location management method for Hierarchical Mobile IPv6 using the MN's mobile history. In this method, when a MN performs a handover, the Access Router calculates the area-covered rate of each upper MAP from the MN's mobile history and selects the MAP that best manages the MN in accordance with its rate. Thus, the proposed method reduces both the number of Binding Updates to the Home Agent and the signaling traffic because it reduces the frequency of changing the MAP. We evaluate the performance of the proposed method by simulation.