Design and development of network simulator module for distributed mobility management protocol

Distributed Mobility Management (DMM) is presented recently by IETF to overcome the limitations of the conventional Centralized Mobility Management (CMM) protocols. It is developed based on the network-based CMM protocol; Proxy Mobile IPv6 (PMIPv6). DMM tackles the issue of relying on a single entity by decoupling the control and data planes and distributes the functionalities of the centralized entity in CMM protocols. To study and examine the performance of DMM protocol, different evaluation approaches can be utilized. Although the test-bed implementation is more realistic approach, its drawbacks, such as high cost, complexity and unscalable, make the utilization of test-bed extremely difficult. Alternatively, simulation is an inexpensive and effective approach of testing various complex scenarios with scalability features. In this context, this paper presents DMM module for Network Simulator-2 (NS-2) implementing DMM entities, functionalities and operation. The paper also evaluates the performance of DMM protocol comparing to CMM protocol in different scenarios. The analytical evaluation of handover latency and session recover time is employed to ensure validity and reliability of DMM module. The results show that the developed module is valid and reliable where the theoretical results are approximately similar to the results obtained from simulation.