Load Balancing for Proxy Mobile IPv6 in SAE-based Mobile Networks

Abstract

In the existing Proxy Mobile IPv6 (PMIP) scheme for mobile networks based on the System Architecture Evolution (SAE), the Mobile Access Gateway (MAG) of PMIP is deployed at the Serving Gateway (S-GW) and the Local Mobility Anchor (LMA) of PMIP is employed at the PDN Gateway (P-GW). In this scheme, P-GW shall process data traffic as well as control traffic for binding update. Such a mobility scheme tends to give large traffic overhead at P-GW and increased operational costs. In this paper, we propose the load balancing schemes for PMIP in the SAE-based mobile networks. In the proposed schemes, the data delivery function and the mobility control function are separated, in which the mobility control function for binding update and query will be performed by a newly introduced Mobility Control Agent (MCA), and the data delivery function is done by P-GW. Before data transmission, an optimal data path will be obtained from MCA by using the binding query function. As per the location of MCA, the proposed schemes are divided into the two cases: 1) MCA over P-GW of SAE and 2) MCA over Mobility Management Entity (MME) of SAE. By numerical analysis, the two proposed schemes are compared with the existing scheme. From the numerical results, we see that the proposed load balancing PMIP schemes can give better performance than the existing PMIP scheme in terms of traffic overhead and transmission delay. In particular, it is shown that the PMIP load balancing scheme with MCA over MME provides the best performance among the candidate schemes.