IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON INDUSTRIAL ELECTRONICS, VOL. 60, NO. 3, MARCH 2013 1077 Comparative Handover Performance Analysis of IPv6 Mobility Management Protocols Jong-Hyouk Lee, Member, IEEE, Jean-Marie Bonnin, Senior Member, IEEE, Ilsun You, and Tai-Myoung Chung, Senior Member, IEEE Abstract—IPv6 mobility management is one of the most chal- lenging research topics for enabling mobility service in the forth- coming mobile wireless ecosystems. The Internet Engineering Task Force has been working for developing efficient IPv6 mobility management protocols. As a result, Mobile IPv6 and its extensions such as Fast Mobile IPv6 and Hierarchical Mobile IPv6 have been developed as host-based mobility management protocols. While the host-based mobility management protocols were being en- hanced, the network-based mobility management protocols such as Proxy Mobile IPv6 (PMIPv6) and Fast Proxy Mobile IPv6 (FPMIPv6) have been standardized. In this paper, we analyze and compare existing IPv6 mobility management protocols including the recently standardized PMIPv6 and FPMIPv6. We identify each IPv6 mobility management protocol’s characteristics and performance indicators by examining handover operations. Then, we analyze the performance of the IPv6 mobility management protocols in terms of handover latency, handover blocking prob- ability, and packet loss. Through the conducted numerical results, we summarize considerations for handover performance. Index Terms—Fast Mobile IPv6 (FMIPv6), Fast Proxy Mobile IPv6 (FPMIPv6), Hierarchical Mobile IPv6 (HMIPv6), Mobile IPv6 (MIPv6), Proxy Mobile IPv6 (PMIPv6). I. I NTRODUCTION M OBILE wireless ecosystems facilitate more rapid growth of digital ecosystems for our human lives [1]–[6]. Mobility management protocols are at the heart of the mobile wireless ecosystems. Mobile social networking, mobile collaboration computing, and mobile shopping shall become a reality with a well-deployed mobility management architecture. Various mobility management protocols for enabling mo- bility service have been introduced. In particular, mobility support in the network layer has been being developed by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). Since the Mobile IPv6 (MIPv6) specification [7] was published, extensions including Fast Mobile IPv6 (FMIPv6) [8] and Hierarchical Mobile IPv6 (HMIPv6) [9] for enhancing the performance of MIPv6 have been developed. During the time when the extensions to MIPv6 Manuscript received August 23, 2011; revised March 5, 2012; accepted April 18, 2012. Date of publication May 4, 2012; date of current version October 16, 2012. J.-H. Lee and J.-M. Bonnin are with the Networks, Security and Multimedia (RSM) Department, TELECOM Bretagne, 35576 Cesson-Sévigné, France (e-mail: jh.lee@telecom-bretagne.eu; jm.bonnin@telecom-bretagne.eu). I. You is with the School of Information Science, Korean Bible University, Seoul 139-791, Korea (e-mail: isyou@bible.ac.kr). T.-M. Chung is with Sungkyunkwan University, Suwon 440-746, Korea (e-mail: tmchung@ece.skku.ac.kr). Color versions of one or more of the figures in this paper are available online at http://ieeexplore.ieee.org. Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/TIE.2012.2198035 were developed, comparative performance analysis for IPv6 mobility management protocols has been used as inputs for developing improvements [10], [11]. For instance, comparative performance analysis studied for MIPv6, FMIPv6, HMIPv6, and a combination of FMIPv6 and HMIPv6 has been carried out in [12] and [13] that identify each mobility management protocol’s characteristics and performance indicators. While host-based mobility management protocols are de- ployable in wireless mobile communication infrastructures, communication service providers and standards development organizations have recognized that such conventional solutions for mobility service are not suitable; in particular, for telecom- munication service, a mobile node (MN) is required to have mobility functionalities at its network protocol stack inside, and thus, modifications or upgrades of the MN are forced. It obviously increases the operation expense and complexity for the MN. The host-based mobility management protocols also cause lack of control for operators since the MN manages its own mobility support. Accordingly, a new approach to support mobility service has been required and pushed by the 3rd Generation Partnership Project to the IETF. Proxy Mobile IPv6 (PMIPv6) is a network-based mobility management protocol that allows an MN to change its point of attachment without any mobility signaling processed at the MN [14]. Two types of mobility service provisioning entity are introduced in PMIPv6: mobility access gateway (MAG) and local mobility anchor (LMA). A MAG is a mobility service provisioning entity which is responsible for detecting and reg- istering the movement of the MN in its access network. As the MAG detects the movement of the MN, it sends a proxy binding update (BU) (PBU) message to the LMA. Note that the LMA operates as a home agent (HA) as specified in [7] and also involves additional functions. As it receives the PBU message for the MN, the LMA recognizes that the MN has attached to the MAG and creates/updates the binding cache for the MN. The MAG receives the proxy binding acknowledgment (BAck) (PBAck) message including the home network prefix (HNP) for the MN and then sends the router advertisement (RA) message including the HNP. The MN configures its address, proxy home address (pHoA), based on the HNP included in the RA message sent from the MAG in the access network. Because the LMA always provisions the same HNP for a given MN during its movements, the MN obtains the same pHoA within the PMIPv6 domain. Owing to the network-based mobility service provided by mobility service provisioning entities, the entire PMIPv6 domain appears as a single link from the perspective of the MN [14]. As an extension protocol to PMIPv6, Fast Proxy Mobile 0278-0046/$31.00 © 2012 IEEE