Wireless Pers Commun (2014) 74:1245–1263 DOI 10.1007/s11277-013-1575-0 Performance Analysis on Network-Based Distributed Mobility Management Hassan Ali-Ahmad · Meryem Ouzzif · Philippe Bertin · Xavier Lagrange Published online: 8 January 2014 © Springer Science+Business Media New York 2014 Abstract Recently, various efforts from both industry and academia are being performed on specifying distributed mobility management (DMM). One of the early and promising network-based DMM proposals is dynamic mobility anchoring (DMA). This paper carries out a performance analysis on DMA in terms of mobility costs and handover performance, comparing it with proxy mobile IPv6 (PMIPv6). For the cost analysis, we consider signaling, processing, data packet delivery, and tunneling costs. For the handover analysis, we consider handover latency, handover failure probability, and handover packet loss as performance metrics. The impacts of several parameters on the mobility costs and handover performance are investigated. The results show that DMA outperforms PMIPv6 significantly in optimizing the network resources consumption as well as the mobility management performance. Keywords Distributed mobility management · Dynamic mobility anchoring · Proxy mobile IPv6 · Performance analysis Abbreviations AR Access router CN Correspondent node DB Database DMA Dynamic mobility anchoring DMM Distributed mobility management DNS Domain name system FQDN Fully qualified domain name LMA Local mobility anchor H. Ali-Ahmad (B ) · M. Ouzzif · P. Bertin Orange Labs, Rennes, France e-mail: hmaliahmad@gmail.com H. Ali-Ahmad · X. Lagrange Telecom Bretagne, Rennes, France 123