Cost and efficiency analysis of hierarchical SIGMA

To facilitate seamless Internet connectivity to mobile nodes, we earlier proposed SIGMA, a transport layer mobility management protocol. However, frequent handoff of the mobile nodes produce excessive signaling overhead in the bandwidth-limited air interfaces and cause large handover delay, thereby degrading the performance. Hierarchical mobility management for SIGMA aims at resolving this problem by introducing micro-mobility agents in the hierarchy. In this paper, we perform a comprehensive cost and efficiency analysis of the key mobility management entities of Hierarchical SIGMA taking into account all possible costs. We present numerical results comparing Hierarchical SIGMA with standard hierarchical mobility protocol. Our results demonstrate that Hierarchical SIGMA requires less cost and yields better performance. Our analysis can be used as a framework to compare performance and signaling overheads of mobility protocols for next generation networks.