Distributed mobility management scheme with mobility routing function at the gateways

The current IP mobility management solutions standardized by IETF rely on a centralized and static mobility anchor point approach to manage mobility signaling and forward data traffic. The approach requires all data traffic sent to a Mobile Node (MN) to travel via the central anchor point regardless of where the MN is currently attached in the Internet. This leads to increased packet delivery latency as the packets follow a non-optimal path via mobility anchor point in MN's home network. This paper develops a distributed mobility management scheme that releases the burden of the central mobility anchor by distributing the mobility routing function to the gateway of each sub-network. The scheme optimizes the data path for the MN that has moved to a visited network, hence, reduces the packet delivery latency. The paper presents in detail the scheme design, operational mechanism and performance evaluation through simulation. The simulation results show the improved packet delivery latency as compared to non-optimized scheme in both less loaded and heavily loaded network conditions.