Abstract—One of the major challenges for the nextgenerationmobile systems is related to efficient mobilitymanagement issue. In this paper, we propose a new micromobilitymanagement scheme, called Micro Mobile MPLS,that supports both mobility and quality-of-service (QoS)management in wireless networks. Our proposal includestwo protocol variants. In the first variant, called FHMicroMobile MPLS, we consider the fast handoff (FH)mechanism, which anticipates the LSP (Label SwitchedPath) procedure setup with an adjacent neighbor subnetthat an MN is likely to visit. This mechanism is proposedto reduce service disruption by using the link-layer (L2)functionalities. In the second variant, called FC-Micro MobileMPLS, the forwarding chain (FC) concept is providedto track efficiently the host mobility within a domain.This concept is more suitable for MNs with high mobilityrate. In order to assess the efficiency of our proposals,all underlying protocols are compared. To achieve this, wedevelop analytical models to evaluate the link usage cost,the registration updates cost, the handoff latency and thepacket loss rate. Numerical and simulation results showthat the proposed mechanisms can significantly reduce theregistration updates cost and provide low handoff latencyand packet loss rate under various scenarios.

Index Terms—Mobile IP, MPLS, mobility tracking andmodeling, micro-mobility, fast handoff, forwarding chain,wireless systems.

Cite: Rami Langar
, and Nizar Bouabdallah, "On the Analysis of Mobility Mechanisms in Micro Mobile MPLS Access Networks," Journal of Communications, vol. 1, no. 6, pp. 18-27, 2006.