Anchor Free IP Mobility

Efficient mobility management techniques are critical in providing seamless connectivity and session continuity between a mobile node and the network during its movement. However, current mobility management solutions generally require a central entity in the network core, tracking IP address movement and anchoring traffic from source to destination through point-to-point tunnels. This approach suffers from scalability limitations as it creates bottlenecks in the network, due to sub-optimal routing via the anchor point. Meanwhile, alternative anchorless solutions are not feasible due to the current limitations of IP semantics, which strongly tie addressing information to location. In contrast, this paper introduces a novel anchorless mobility solution by exploiting a new path-based forwarding fabric together with emerging mechanisms from information-centric networking. These mechanisms decouple the IP address from the path based data forwarding to eliminate the need for traffic anchoring; thereby, allowing flexible path calculation and service provisioning. The solution is modelled as a Markov-chain which applies a topological basis to describe mobility. The validity of the Markovian model was verified through simulation of both random walk mobility on random geometric networks and trace information from a large-scale, city wide data set. Evaluation results illustrate a significant reduction in the total network traffic cost when using the proposed solution, compared to PMIPv6.