D-PMIPv6: A distributed mobility management scheme supported by data and control plane separation

Abstract Over the past few years, modern mobile subscriber devices such as Smartphones, tablets and PDAs have become more and more popular which use network resources in a more aggressive way and last for longer durations involving dramatically increasing traffic volumes. But traditional mobility management schemes have hardly taken this issue into account. Distributed mobility management is considered as a new trend for developing a mobility management scheme to address such an issue. This paper proposes D-PMIPv6, which is to achieve a distributed mobility management scheme supported by data and control plane separation based on PMIPv6. In the architecture of D-PMIPv6, the traditional functional entity Local mobility anchor (LMA) is split into two parts: Control plane LMA and Data plane LMA. We conclude with the three goals of distributed mobility management. With its elaborate design, D-PMIPv6 is proved to achieve these goals. Numerical results show that a single Control plane LMA can hold quite a number of MNs and the handover performance of D-PMIPv6 is acceptable compared to PMIPv6. Meanwhile, D-PMIPv6 can improve the performance in terms of the packet delivery cost compared to other mobility management schemes.