Survey and Analysis of Integrating PMIPv6 and MIH Mobility Management Approaches for Heterogeneous Wireless Networks

The deployment of different types of wireless technologies led to additional challenges to the issue of mobility management in next generation wireless networks. In addition to the regular movement of the mobile users in a heterogeneous environment, users’ demand for more real time services results in more handover complexity. Even though the network-based proxy mobile IPv6 (PMIPv6) is considered a favorable protocol for mobility management and the IEEE 802.21 media independent handover (MIH) framework designed to support seamless handover in heterogeneous networks, these protocols, each one separately, fails to provide seamless handover procedure for time sensitive applications in heterogeneous wireless networks. Therefore, several works have been done to integrate the network-based PMIPv6 with the capabilities of MIH to obtain an enhanced solution. In this paper, we reviewed the PMIPv6 and MIH integration schemes in the literature and we categorized them into six schemes based on the signals or network entities modifications. Also, we provide a comparative analytical evaluation for handover procedures of these schemes in terms of signaling cost, total handover latency, and packet loss. Based on the features and analysis, the integration with network is the best solution that to be considered.