Abstract
Recently, the mobility management of urban vehicular networks has become great challenges for researchers due to its unique mobility requirements imposed by mobile users when accessing different services in a random fashion. To provide a ubiquitous Internet and seamless connectivity, the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) has proposed a Proxy Mobile IPv6 (PMIPv6) protocol. This is meant to address the signaling of the mobility transparent to the Mobile Node (MN) and also guarantee session continuity while the MN is in motion. However, performing a handoff by tens of thousands of MNs may harm the performance of the system significantly due to the high signaling overhead and the insufficient utilization of so-called Binding Cash Entry (BCE) at the Local Mobility Anchor (LMA). To address these issues, we propose an efficient scheme within the PMIPv6 protocol, named AE-PMIPv6 scheme, to effectively utilize the BCE at the LMA. This is primarily achieved by merging the BCEs of the MNs, thus, reducing the signaling overhead. Better utilization of the BCEs has been attained by employing virtual addresses and addressing pool mechanisms for the purpose of binding information of the MNs that are moving together towards the same network at a specific time, during their handoff process. Results obtained from our simulation demonstrates the superiority of AE-PMIPv6 scheme over E-PMIPv6 scheme. The AE-PMIPv6 succeeds in minimizing the signaling overhead, reduces the handover time and at the same time efficiently utilize the buffer resources.