Performance Analysis of PMIPv6-Based NEtwork MObility for Intelligent Transportation Systems

While host mobility support for individual mobile hosts (MHs) has been widely investigated and developed over the past years, there has been relatively less attention to NEtwork MObility (NEMO). Since NEMO Basic Support (NEMO-BS) was developed, it has been the central pillar in Intelligent Transport Systems (ITS) communication architectures for maintaining the vehicle's Internet connectivity. As the vehicle moves around, it attaches to a new access network and is required to register a new address obtained from the new access network to a home agent (HA). This location update of NEMO-BS often results in unacceptable long handover latency and increased traffic load to the vehicle. To address these issues, in this paper, we introduce new NEMO support protocols, which rely on mobility service provisioning entities introduced in Proxy Mobile IPv6 (PMIPv6), as possible mobility support protocols for ITS. As a base protocol, we present PMIPv6-based NEMO (P-NEMO) to maintain the vehicle's Internet connectivity while moving and without participating in the location update management. In P-NEMO, the mobility management for the vehicle is supported by mobility service provisioning entities residing in a given PMIPv6 domain. To further improve handover performance, fast P-NEMO (FP-NEMO) has been developed as an extension protocol. FP-NEMO utilizes wireless L2 events to anticipate the vehicle's handovers. The mobility service provisioning entities prepare the vehicle's handover prior to the attachment of the vehicle to the new access network. Detailed handover procedures for P-NEMO and FP-NEMO are provided, and handover timing diagrams are presented to evaluate the performance of the proposed protocols. P-NEMO and FP-NEMO are compared with NEMO-BS in terms of traffic cost and handover latency.