Mobility Support Using Locator-Identifier Separation Protocol in 4G Mobile Communication Networks

Abstract

The System Architecture Evolution (SAE) with Long Term Evolution (LTE) has been used as a key technology in 4G mobile communication networks. In the existing study to support mobility in SAE-based mobile networks, the Proxy Mobile IPv6 (PMIP) was considered and the Mobile IP (MIP) may be used for global mobility support with Internet hosts. However, the architecture of PMIP with MIP tends to induce large data transmission and route update delays in SAE-based mobile networks. To overcome these limitations, this paper proposes the Locator Identifier Separation Protocol (LISP)-based mobility management schemes in SAE-based mobile networks. For LISP mobility support, we introduce a Local Map Server (LMS) which can be implemented with the mobility management entity (MME) of SAE and used to perform the LISP identifier-locator mapping management for LISP hosts within a mobile network. As per the location of LISP Tunnel Router (TR), the proposed schemes are divided into the two specific schemes: a host-based scheme, in which the LISP TR is implemented at a mobile host, and a network-based scheme, in which LTE evolved Node B (eNB) performs the LISP TR functionality. By numerical analysis, the two proposed schemes are compared with the existing PMIP-MIP scheme in terms of data transmission and route update delays. From numerical results, we see that the proposed LISP-based mobility management schemes can give better performance than the existing PMIP-MIP scheme. In particular, it is shown that the network-based LISP mobility management scheme provides the best performance among the candidate schemes.