Scalability and robustness analysis of mobile IPv6, fast mobile IPv6, hierarchical mobile IPv6, and hybrid IPv6 mobility protocols using a large-scale simulation

Fast mobile IPv6 (FMIP) and hierarchical mobile IPv6 (HMIP) are enhancements to the standard mobile IPv6 (SMIP) protocol for reducing handover latency and data loss, and for localized mobility management. In this paper, we present scalability and robustness analysis of the three protocols and two hybrid protocols of FMIP and HMIP, using a large-scale simulation. The simulation results indicate that FMIP achieves the best handover performance. HMIP incurs considerably less per-handover signaling overhead than FMIP on the wireless link, but HMIP data traffic has a fixed and permanent overhead even after handover. Hybrid protocols achieve FMIP-like handover performance and improve handover signaling overhead but cannot remove tunneling overhead. Hybrid protocols are also more robust to access router and home agent failures.