QoS aware dynamic route optimization for Proxy Mobile IPv6 networks

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.