Performance analysis of Hierarchical Mobile IPv6: Does it improve mobile IPv6 in terms of handover speed?

There has been a rapid growth in the need to support mobile nodes in IPv6-based networks. IETF has completed to standardize Mobile IPv6 (MIPv6) and Hierarchical Mobile IPv6 (HMIPv6) for supporting IPv6 mobility. Even though existing literatures have asserted that HMIPv6 generally improves MIPv6 in terms of handover speed, they do not carefully consider the details of the whole handover procedures. In this paper, based on the current IETF standards of both MIPv6 and HMIPv6, we conduct a comprehensive study of all IP-level handover procedures: movement detection, duplicate address detection, and location registration. Based on this study, we provide a mathematical analysis on MIPv6 and HMIPv6 performance in terms of handover speed. From the analysis, we reveal that the average HMIPv6 handover latency is not always lower than the average MIPv6 handover latency. Furthermore, even the intra-domain handover latency of HMIPv6 is not reduced much compared with MIPv6 handover latency. A finding of our analysis is that optimization techniques for movement detection and duplicate address detection are essential to shortening HMIPv6 handover latency and increasing the benefit of HMIPv6.