A cluster-based proxy mobile IPv6 for IP-WSNs

The Sensor Proxy Mobile IPv6 (SPMIPv6) has been designed for IP-based wireless sensor networks mobility to potentially save energy consumption by relieving the sensor nodes from participating in the handoff process. However, SPMIPv6 is dependent on a single and central Local Mobility Anchor (LMA), and thus, it inherited most of the problems observed in the Proxy Mobile IPv6 (PMIPv6) protocol, including long handoff latency, non-optimized communication path, and bottleneck issues. In addition, SPMIPv6 extends the single point of failure to include both the authentication and network information. This study presents an enhanced architecture for SPMIPv6 called Clustered SPMIPv6 (CSPMIPv6) to overcome the problems above. In the proposed architecture, the Mobility Access Gateways (MAGs) are grouped into clusters, each with a distinguished cluster Head MAG (HMAG). The HMAG is mainly designed to reduce the load on LMA by performing intra-cluster handoff signaling and providing an optimized path for data communications. The proposed architecture is evaluated analytically, and the numerical results show that the proposed CSPMIPv6 outperforms both SPMIPv6 and PMIPv6 protocols in terms of LMA load, local handoff delay, and transmission cost performance metrics.