WIRELESS COMMUNICATIONS AND MOBILE COMPUTING Wirel. Commun. Mob. Comput. 2011; 11:508–521 Published online 8 October 2009 in Wiley Online Library (wileyonlinelibrary.com). DOI: 10.1002/wcm.846 SPECIAL ISSUE PAPER QoS aware dynamic route optimization for Proxy Mobile IPv6 Networks A. Dev Pragad ∗ , Vasilis Friderikos, Paul Pangalos and A. Hamid Aghvami Centre for Telecommunications Research, King’s College London, London WC2R 2LS, U.K. ABSTRACT Proxy Mobile IPv6 is a network based mobility management solution and was proposed to address the shortcomings of the existing set of mobility management protocols. The presence of local mobility anchors (LMA) in PMIPv6 networks can lead constrained routing and create areas of bottleneck. This is due to all traffic to the mobile nodes (MNs) in the PMIPv6 domain having to flow to and from the LMA. Future IP networks will support a wide variety of sessions ranging for high QoS Video conferencing to FTP and P2P download. Providing the same level of mobility support for all of these sessions can lead to the resources of LMA being drained. To avoid this, we propose the QoS aware Dynamic Route Optimization scheme where the network identifies the lower QoS sessions and establishes a binding update with the correspondant node (CN) rather than with the LMA. To achieve this a flow based binding approach is followed. The level of congestion in the network is also considered as part of the mechanism. To ensure optimal performance of the proposed mechanism, routing policies are proposed. Simulation results show considerable benefit to the network in terms of reduction in blocking probability as well as reduction in tunnelling overhead cost in comparisons to no route optimization (RO) and adaptive route optimization (ARO) being deployed in the PMIPv6 networks. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. KEYWORDS Proxy Mobile IPv6; dynamic route optimization; QoS routing; mobility anchors; traffic engineering * Correspondence A. Dev Pragad, Centre for Telecommunications Research, Norfolk Building, King’s College London, London WC2R 2LS, U.K. E-mail: dev.p.adusin@kcl.ac.uk 1. INTRODUCTION The demand for ubiquitous (anytime and anywhere) communication is on the rise with the explosive growth in the number of portable wireless devices. Providing efficient mobile internet to these portable devices will facilitate the era of ubiquitous communications. However, there exists many challenges on the path towards the realization of this. One of the major hurdles is in supporting efficient mobility management of the plethora of mobile devices as they move while accessing multimedia rich sessions with stringent QoS requirements. Providing mobility support to prevent frequent disruption to the ongoing sessions is one of the cor- nerstones for the successful deployment of mobile IP based communications. With the range of future cells expected to become smaller (such as femtocells [1]) to support higher data rates, a ‘mobility storm’ can be expected from the ever increasing number of wireless devices. To counter this not just efficient mobility support mechanisms are required but a network management approach in conjunction with mobility support is required to manage the severe strain caused to the network by the expected ‘mobility storm’. Mobile IPv6 [2] has become the defacto standard in sup- porting IP connectivity to devices that move across the internet. However, it has to be kept in mind that Mobile IP allows devices to change their IP address through move- ment and yet be identifiable throughout the internet via a unique home address. As such, Mobile IPv6 solution can- not be utilized for providing efficient and seamless mobility management. The issues of large handover delays, packet loss and signalling are well documented in the literature (see Reference [3]). To fill the gap left open by Mobile IPv6 numerous micro-mobility solutions were proposed such as Cellular IP [4], HAWAII [5], Hierarchical Mobile IPv6 (HMIPv6) [6], Fast Mobile IPv6 (FMIPv6) [7], amongst others [8,9]. One of the major drawback of these proposed micro- mobility solutions is that they are mobile node (MN) based, i.e. the MNs require upgrade of protocol stack. This increases the complexity of the mobile devices. This has become a major hurdle in these solutions being accepted 508 Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.