Distributed Mobility Management Scheme with Multiple LMAs in Proxy Mobile IPv6

The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) has been actively standardizing distributed mobility management (DMM) schemes with multiple Mobility Anchors (MAs). Yet, all existing schemes have limitations that preclude the efficient distribution of mobile data traffic, including single point failure problems, heavy tunneling overheads between MAs, and a restrictive traffic distribution for external nodes in a mobility domain. Therefore, this paper proposes an efficient mobility management scheme with a virtual Local Mobility Anchor (vLMA). While the vLMA is designed assuming multiple replicated LMAs for a PMIPv6 domain, it acts virtually as a single LMA for the internal and external nodes in the PMIPv6 domain. Furthermore, the vLMA distributes mobile data traffic using replicated LMAs, and routes packets via a replicated LMA on the optimal routing path. Performance evaluations confirm that the proposed scheme can distribute mobile data traffic more efficiently and reduce the end-to-end packet delay than the Distributed Local Mobility Anchor (DLMA) and the Proxy Mobile IPv6 (PMIPv6).