A low cost paging scheme for clustered PMIPv6 protocol by head-MAG entity utilisation

Clustered PMIPv6 (CPMIPv6) was proposed to reduce the PMIPv6 signalling cost by dividing the domain into clusters each with a Head-MAG used to control the intra-cluster operations. However, existing mobility protocols perform registration process even for idle nodes, which leads to degrade the protocol performance due to unnecessary location updates. On the other hand, paging technique is widely used in cellular networks to reduce the signalling required for idle nodes registration. Although several paging schemes were proposed to enhance the PMIPv6 performance, they are either based on central entity or they incur high signalling cost due to multicasting. Inspired by CPMIPv6 architecture, this paper proposes a low cost paging scheme where each cluster is considered as a paging area and head-MAGs entities are utilised to perform the paging functions within the cluster. The analytical results show that the proposed scheme outperforms the existing paging schemes in terms of paging signalling cost.