Adaptive mobility anchor point to reduce regional registration and packets delivery costs q Prem Nath ⇑ , Chiranjeev Kumar 1 Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Indian School of Mines (ISM), Dhanbad 826004, India article info Article history: Available online 2 January 2014 abstract MIPv6 (Mobile IPv6) has been developed as macro-mobility management protocol to sup- port mobility of MUs (mobile users) over the Internet. Hierarchical Mobile IPv6 (HMIPv6) has been developed as micro-mobility management protocol. There are many other mobility management protocols proposed so far like Fast Mobile IPv6, Proxy Mobile IPv6, Optimal Choice of Mobility management, and Fast Proxy Mobile IPv6. These are based on MIPv6 and HMIPv6 and have their own advantages and limitations. These protocols do not consider the fixed mobility pattern of MUs. Many MUs have fixed mobility pattern on daily basis and there is scope of further reduction in regional registration cost. We propose an AMAP (Adaptive Mobility Anchor Point) to minimize the regional registration cost and packet delivery cost in IPv6 networks. The AMAP is a special mobility anchor point which is selected based on the activity rate (ARate) of MUs. Ó 2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. 1. Introduction The future generation telecommunication networks will be focused on seamless mobility management while keeping the Internet services on top. The main objective of IP mobility support is to enable a MU (mobile user) to change its point of attachment to the Internet while maintaining connectivity. The notion of MIPv6 (Mobile IPv6) [1] has been suggested to facilitate the mobility of MUs over the Internet. HMIPv6 (Hierarchical MIPv6) scheme [2] has been proposed to overcome of limitation of MIPv6. The system employed in HMIPv6 scheme has been shown in Fig. 1. This protocol employs the mobility anchor point (MAP) to localize the registration traffic in order to reduce the home registration cost. In HMIPv6 scheme, the network architecture is centralized and the sys- tem performance is critically affected by the selection of MAPs and their reliability. Another scheme improved over MIPv6 is Fast MIPv6 (FMIPv6) scheme [3] which enables fast handover by anticipating the movement of MU. An efficient handover solution has been proposed by Mahedi Hassan and Hoong [4]. A network-assisted mobility management protocol has been proposed in [5] called Proxy MIPv6 (PMIPv6) and revised in [6]. PMIPv6 enables the MU to change its location without any signaling generated. There is an extension protocol to PMIPv6 named as Fast PMIPv6 (FPMIPv6) proposed by Yokota et al. [7]. This protocol accelerates the handover performance by reducing handover latency and prevents packets loss. Another network assisted mobility management solution has been proposed by Dong et al. [8]. These protocols are still not deployed in real networks due to limitations of being host-based mobility management protocols [9]. 0045-7906/$ - see front matter Ó 2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.compeleceng.2013.12.005 q Reviews processed and recommended for publication to Editor-in-Chief by Guest Editor Dr. Jing Tian. ⇑ Corresponding author. Tel.: +91 33 23353705. E-mail addresses: pmnath26@gmail.com (P. Nath), k_chiranjeev@yahoo.co.uk (C. Kumar). 1 Tel./fax: +91 326 2296563. Computers and Electrical Engineering 40 (2014) 1329–1343 Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Computers and Electrical Engineering journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/compeleceng