Investigate IPv6 mobility and roaming issues

Thesis (Master) -- University of Cyprus, Faculty of Pure and Applied Sciences, Department of Computer Science, 2007.Mobility is becoming more and more important in our days mostly because of the need to support always-on network services like videoconferencing, VoIP etc. In recent years there is an increase in demand from end-users to access network resources from anywhere and at any time from all kind of devices. An additional demand is for the mobile users to receive uninterrupted services. To overcome the mobility problem, protocols such as MIPv4 (Mobile IPv4) were designed. Mobile IP offers the ability to users to move (roam) through different subnetted networks without loosing their connectivity. As the new IPv6 protocol is emerging and in order to support the IPv6 nodes a new Mobile protocol MIPv6 was designed. This protocol allows an IPv6 node to be mobile, and arbitrarily change its location on the IPv6 Internet while still maintain its existing connections. This thesis investigates IPv6 mobility and roaming issues by simulation. In order to better understand the MIPV6 protocol it was necessary first to have a good understanding of the IPv6 protocol in theory and implementation. For that reason the IPv6 protocol was also implemented on live networks. Furthermore by using the simulation tool OPNET for different mobility scenarios an attempt was made to investigate the strengths and weaknesses of the MIPv6 by examining the various parameters of a MIPv6 environment that could influence the quality of the provided network services. In order to investigate mobility and roaming issues in MIPv6 an extensive set of MIPv6 scenarios were designed and implemented in this thesis. For each scenario various simulations were run examining different parameters that could influence the MIPv6 operation and quality of service. The results reveal that MIPv6 can be greatly influenced from the setting of parameters like Access Point Transmit Power or Mobile Node Mobility Detection Factor either when these parameters are changed alone or in combination. This thesis, guided by the results from the simulation scenarios offers some understanding of the behavior of the MIPv6 protocol, and how the parameters influence its behavior, and hence their operational setup is discussed.It is worth noting that there is no similar work as in my knowledge where so many parameters are tested. Some of these parameters are studied in other work but not the same way as in this thesis. This approach allows one to understand better MIPv6 and better tune the values of these parameters to a real environment