A Study on Estimation of Mobility of Terminals for Hierarchical Mobility Management Scheme

Hierarchical Mobile IPv6 (HMIPv6) has been proposed to manage the mobility of Mobile Terminals (MTs) hierarchically to reduce packet losses during local handover. HMIPv6 uses a mobility manageable router in a domain visited by the MTs to manage the micromobility of the MTs. The router is called Mobility Anchor Point (MAP). As a hierarchical mobility management scheme based on HMIPv6, we have already proposed a multilevel hierarchical distributed IP mobility management scheme to manage the mobility of MTs in a decentralized manner using multiple MAPs. Our scheme manages the mobility of an MT using a MAP having a suitable management domain. This usage of MAPs aims to efficiently decentralize the load of mobility management. Our scheme estimates the movement speed of the MT and then estimates the mobility of the MT based on the estimated movement speed of the MT to achieve the objective. However, recent simulation results obtained with more realistic mobility model indicate that our scheme has two problems in estimating the mobility of MTs: One is that our current scheme misestimates the movement speed of an MT in some cases, and the other is that our current scheme does not notice the changes in the mobility of an MT when the MT decelerates and stays in the same access area for a long time. Thus, an enhanced mobility estimation method is proposed in this paper. The enhanced method has an ability to estimate the movement speed of MTs more correctly and an ability to urge decelerated MTs to degrade their MAP quickly. Finally, the performance of the proposed mobility estimation method is evaluated using simulation experiments. The simulation results show that the enhanced method allows our scheme to estimate the mobility of MTs more correctly and so achieve more efficient load sharing.