Mobility management in wireless networks has been a hot topic in research for the past ten years. Meanwhile, the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) has standardized a few protocols in the field, including mobile Internet protocol version 6 (MIPv6), hierarchical mobile IPv6 (HMIPv6), and proxy mobile IPv6 (PMIPv6), to provide mobility management in IP networks. The authors of this paper “introduce the concept of virtual mobility domain [VMD] and describe [its] main features and key strengths,” which are “designed to provide mobility management in a newly proposed tiered Internet architecture.” Typically, a tiered-addressing scheme is used to identify mobile nodes with a single address regardless of their locations.

Along with a qualitative study of the alternatives, the authors studied handoff latency and signaling overhead for different mobility solutions using analytical results and simulations in OPNET Modeler. They report that a VMD can manage intra-cloud handoff in 98.9 percent, 98.7 percent, and 28.5 percent less time than MIPv6, HMIPv6, and PMIPv6, respectively. Furthermore, the paper demonstrates that VMDs manage inter-cloud handoff in 98.7 percent and 98.2 percent less time than MIPv6 and HMIPv6, and in the same time as PMIPv6. VMD signaling overhead for intra-cloud handoffs was 90.3 percent better than MIPv6, 32.1 percent better than HMIPv6, and 62.5 percent better than PMIPv6. Finally, VMD signaling overhead for inter-cloud handoffs was 80.6 percent better than MIPv6, 35.7 percent worse than HMIPv6, and 25 percent better than PMIPv6. Those results are convincing enough.

The main contributions of this paper are the description of the VMD and the discussion of its performance against existing mobility management schemes. The collaborative management scheme described in the paper is also fairly innovative. Researchers, innovators, developers, and regulators of mobility architectures in wireless networks should find it worth reading.