A Study on the Performance of IPv6-Based Mobility Protocols: Mobile IPv6 vs. Hierarchical Mobile IPv6

The performance of IP mobility protocols is highly dependent on the change of mobile nodes' (MNs') mobility and traffic-related characteristics. Therefore, it is essential to investigate the effects of these characteristics and to conduct an in-depth performance study of these protocols. In this paper, we introduce a novel analytical approach using a continuous-time Markov chain model and hierarchical network model for the performance analysis of IPv6 mobility protocols: Mobile IPv6 (MIPv6) and Hierarchical Mobile IPv6 (HMIPv6). According to these analytical models, we derive the location update costs (i.e., binding update costs plus binding renewal costs), packet tunneling costs, and total signaling costs, which are generated by an MN during its average domain residence time, when MIPv6 or HMIPv6 is deployed under the same network architecture, respectively. In addition, based on these derived costs, we investigate the effects of various parameters, such as the average speed of an MN, binding lifetime period, the ratio of the network scale, and packet arrival rate, on the signaling costs generated by an MN under MIPv6 and HMIPv6. Moreover, we conduct the performance comparison between these two protocols by showing the relative total signaling costs under the various conditions. The analytical results show that as the average speed of an MN gets higher and the binding lifetime period is set to the larger value or as its packet arrival rate gets lower, the total signaling cost generated by an MN during its average domain residence time under HMIPv6 will get relatively lower than that under MIPv6, and that under the reverse conditions, the total signaling cost under MIPv6 will get relatively lower than that under HMIPv6.