Performance Analysis of Multilayer MIPv6 Architecture through Experimental Testbed
Mobility management is a key issue to achieve uninterrupted Internet services in IP based network. In IPv6, the mobility management is realized by its mobile version namely the Mobile IPv6 (MIPv6). The MIPv6 is further extended to Hierarchical MIPv6 (HMIPv6) to reduce handoff latency suffered by mobile nodes and signaling load incurred due to movement if nodes within the micro mobility region defined by HMIPv6. The HMIPv6 is considered as first widely accepted layered architecture for mobility management for IPv6 network. Influenced by the benefits of HMIPv6, many researchers have suggested extension of MIPv6 into multiple layers. However, there is very little work on finding optimal levels of hierarchy in such layered architecture. The focus of this paper is to evaluate the performance of a multilayer (N-layered with N as 5) MIPv6 architecture through experimental testbed. We have observed handoff latency, signaling overhead and tunneling cost and figured out the optimal levels of hierarchy that provides the best acceptable results for all the observed parameters. Since, HMIPv6 outperforms MIPv6 in terms of handoff latency and signaling cost, so we compare our results with HMIPv6. Testbed observation depicts that three levels of hierarchy in MIPv6 architecture provides optimal performance with 27 % reduction in handoff latency and 67 % reduction in signaling overhead compared to single layer architecture like Hierarchical MIPv6 (HMIPv6) protocol.