A New Strategy for Signaling Overhead Reduction in the Proxy Mobile IPv6 Protocol

Problem statement: The rapid growth of the Internet usage has been realized by the Mobile IPv6 (MIPv6). Concurrent to these technological advances is the communication overheads. Proxy Mobile IPv6 (PMIPv6) has been standardized to overcome the long handoff latency, packet loss and signaling overhead of MIPv6 and to exempt the mobile node from any involvement in the handoff process. Although the PMIPv6 has resolved the related MIPv6 problems, it incurs a long handoff time due to the frequent binding updates which requires multiple and redundant authentications and registration operations. For these reasons, research on PMIPv6 has already been devoted to reduce the handoff latency and the packet loss ratio by pre-registering the mobile node to the new network. However, these researches have not been able to reduce the number of signals required for authentication and registration processes which are frequently performed during the binding updates. Approach: In this study, an enhanced PMIPv6 signaling strategy known as the I-PMIPv6 protocol is proposed, in which the authentication and the registration signaling are integrated and deployed coherently to reduce the handoff signaling cost. Results: The proposed protocol is evaluated analytically and the numerical results show that the I-PMIPv6 outperforms the PMIPv6 in terms of the handoff latency time. Conclusion: Reducing the signaling overhead by integrating the authentication and registration steps has indeed reduced the handoff latency which leads to reduce the service disruption during the host movement.