SMS-MIPv6: An End-to-End Mechanism for IPv6 Mobility Management in Mobile Networks

As IP has been extended from core networks to access networks, a mobile network can be considered as an overlay of a traditional cellular network and an IP network. SMS-MIPv6 attempts to integrate mobility management of these two kinds of networks. The basic idea behind SMS-MIPv6 is to exploit existing mobility management in the cellular network (i.e. in the form of well-defined short messages) to locate a Mobile Terminal (MT) in the IPv6 network. We should emphasize that the motivation of SMS-MIPv6 is not to replace or optimize existing mature mobility management schemes. On the contrary, as an entirely end-to-end mechanism for IPv6 mobility management, it provides an alternative mechanism for free peer-to-peer applications such as Voice over IP (VoIP) without support from mobile network operators. We describe the implementation of SMS-MIPv6 in detail and analyze its performance. The evaluation results show that SMS-MIPv6 achieves acceptable performance so that it can be deployed in most current mobile networks. It performs best in terms of signaling cost, data traffic overhead compared with Mobile IPv6 (MIPv6) and Proxy MIPv6 (PMIPv6). Moreover, SMS-MIPv6 can reduce the handover latency significantly, although it is considered as a mobility management scheme for global mobility. However, it increases the session initialization latency due to hybrid binding through the cellular network.