Proxy-based Regional Registration for Integrated Mobility and Service Management in Mobile IP Systems

We propose and analyse a proxy-based regional registration scheme for integrated mobility and service management with the goal to minimize the network signaling and packet delivery cost in Mobile Internet Protocol (MIP) systems. Under the proposed proxy-based regional registration scheme, a client-side proxy is created on a per-user basis to serve as a gateway between a mobile node (MN) and all services engaged by the MN. From the perspective of these services, the proxy behaves as if it were the MN. From the perspective of the MN, the proxy behaves as if it were the services. Leveraging MIP with route optimization, the proxy runs on a foreign agent node and cooperates with the home agent and foreign agents of the MN in the MIP network to maintain the location information of the MN in order to facilitate data delivery by services engaged by the MN. Further the proxy can optimally determine when to move with the MN so as to minimize the network cost associated with the user’s mobility and service management. We investigate the notion of ‘service areas’ for the proxy to perform ‘service handoffs’ in our scheme. We show that, when given a set of parameters characterizing the operational and workload conditions of an MN, there exists an optimal service area size for the MN such that the network communication cost is minimized for serving mobility and service management operations of the MN. We demonstrate via Petri net modeling and analysis that our proposed scheme outperforms both basic MIP and MIP regional registration that do not consider integrated mobility and service management.