An Effective Address Allocation Mechanism in IPv6-Based Mobile Networks

Abstract

For the effective IP-based service implementation in the mobile network environment, the involvement of IP-related technologies in mobile networks is inevitable and an unique IPv6 address allocation to a mobile node is also important issue. In the 3GPP's address allocation mechanism, the IPv6 address allocation procedure is performed by the GGSN which is normally located far from mobile nodes. This causes IPv6 address allocation time delay and the amount of traffics to be longer and to be increased in the core network, respectively. In this paper, we propose a new IPv6 address allocation mechanism that is performed by a Node B located in RAN. The proposed mechanism for IPv6 address allocation can provide an IPv6 addresses to a mobile node within a more reduced time than the existing 3GPP's IPv6 address allocation mechanism, and can co-operate with the existing mechanism as an overlay model to improve the reliability of mobile networks. Also, for the implementation of the proposed address allocation mechanism, it needs not to change the structure of current mobile networks except for the some functional addendum of the Node B. We present the performance of our proposed IPv6 address allocation mechanism by a simulation and discuss the comparison of the result of our scheme with the existing 3GPP's IPv6 address allocation mechanism.