Virtual domains for seamless user mobility

The population of mobile users seeking connectivity to the Internet has been growing over the years, spurred by the capabilities of handsets and the increasing rich Internet content and resources. Mobility management to enable efficient Internet access for users on the move is thus gaining significance. With future Internet design initiatives gaining momentum, it is important that these initiatives consider mobility management as an integral part of the design, keeping in mind that these initiatives also offer the potential for new and novel mobility management schemes. In this article, we introduce the concept of Virtual Mobility Domains (VMD), and describe mobility management using the VMD approach in a newly proposed tiered Internet architecture. The results from a comparative performance study of VMD with mobility management protocols such as Mobile IPv6, Hierarchical Mobile IPv6 and Proxy Mobile IPv6 using simulations show the potential for efficient mobility management under new Internet architectures.