Multilevel hierarchical mobility management scheme in complicated structured networks

Micromobility management is a key issue for achieving enhanced mobile Internet services. Many micromobility management schemes supporting fast handover, e.g., Hierarchical Mobile IPv6 (HMIPv6), have been proposed to minimize the packet loss during handover and the handover latency. We have previously proposed a multilevel hierarchical mobility management scheme that enhances HMIPv6 mobility management. Our scheme manages the micromobility of a Mobile Terminal (MT) using a mobility management router (the Mobility Anchor Point, or MAP), with a management domain matched to the MT's mobility. This usage of MAPs aims to efficiently decentralize the load of mobility management. In our previous work, we have confirmed the effectiveness of our scheme in a network having a simple tree-based hierarchy. The actual networks, however, have some local variation and/or some redundancy in structure. In such a complicated structured network, the MAP domains intricately overlap each other. This causes difficulty in selecting the MAPs suitable for managing the MTs' mobility because the suitable MAP for an MT changes according to the complicated local conditions. This paper proposes a method to allow an MT to select the suitable MAP for the MT in such a network by adjusting the selection criteria individually configured for use at a particular place. Finally, the performance of our scheme is evaluated using simulation experiments. The simulation results show that our scheme works well in complicated structured networks by using the proposed additional method.