EPD-NEMO: efficient PMIPv6-based distributed network mobility management

Current network mobility management protocols allow users to access broadband Internet while moving in vehicles or from vehicles to fixed locations without breaking ongoing sessions. These protocols rely on a central mobility anchor such as home agent or local mobility anchor. Thus, some issues, including a single point of failure, long handover delay, and scalability, are exposed in these existing approaches. Ever-increasing demand for mobile Internet traffic changes the mobile network from a hierarchical architecture to a flat architecture and distributed schemes are being researched for the purpose of adapting to new flat architecture and overcoming the aforementioned issues. In this paper, we do a survey of existing network mobility management protocols, current solutions for distributed mobility management, and present an efficient PMIPv6-based distributed network mobility management scheme. The proposed scheme consists of characteristics of distributed mobility management and a new handover mechanism to reduce the packet delivery overhead while keeping seamless Internet access to users in vehicles. By numerical analysis, we prove that our new approach improves service disruption time and packet delivery cost compared to exiting solutions under various environment conditions.