Distributed Mobility Management Strategy with Pointer Forwarding Technique

With the dramatic increase in mobile traffic in recent years, some of the limitations of mobility management frameworks have magnified. The current centralized mobility management (CMM) strategy has various problems, such as a suboptimal routing path, low scalability, signaling overhead, and a single point of failure. To overcome these weaknesses in the CMM strategy, the Internet Engineering Task Force has been discussing distributed mobility management (DMM) strategies. The fundamental concept of a DMM strategy is to distribute the mobility anchors closer to the users. While the distribution of mobility anchors results in low-cost traffic delivery, it increases the signaling cost. To reduce this higher signaling cost, we propose a new DMM strategy applying the pointer forwarding technique. The proposed strategy keeps the existing tunnels and extends the traffic path as much as possible. In this paper, we analyze the performance of the pointer forwarding-DMM strategy and discuss its pros and cons.