Improving performance of HMIPv6 networks with adaptive MAP selection scheme

Hierarchical Mobile IPv6 (HMIPv6) was designed to reduce the long handover time associated with MIPv6 by employing a hierarchy of Mobile Anchor Points (MAPs). However, the selection of MAP and its load status critically affect the system performance. Thus, in this paper, we introduce two novel dynamic MAP selection schemes for HMIPv6, that relieve overloaded MAPs as well as select a more suitable MAP according to each Mobile Node (MN)'s up-to-date mobility towards reducing inter-domain handover, resulting in saving the overall signaling cost. Further, we develop an analytical model of the average signaling cost for inter-domain handover to investigate the performance of another existing approach with its basis on IETF HMIPv6 as well as our schemes. We also perform simulations to evaluate the performance of our proposed schemes. It is shown via simulation and numerical results that the proposed dynamic MAP selection schemes can significantly reduce the number of inter-domain handovers and the average signaling cost as well as distribute load over multiple MAPs compared to the other existing approaches.