Giust, FabioBernardos Cano, Carlos JesúsOliva Delgado, Antonio de la2022-11-092022-11-092014-11-01IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing, (2014), 13(11), pp.: 2484-2497.1536-1233https://hdl.handle.net/10016/35987Mobile Internet traffic is growing steeply, mainly due to the deployment of new broadband wireless technologies and the ever increasing connectivity demand coming from new services being available to mobile users. Current mobile network architectures rely on centralized mobility protocols which intrinsically pose enormous burdens on the central anchors, both in terms of connectivity needs and user mobility management. In order to face these issues, a new paradigm, called Distributed Mobility Management, is being explored, based on flattening the network architecture by deploying multiple mobility anchors at the edge of the network. In this article we conduct an analytic and experimental evaluation of a network-based IP distributed mobility management solution that leverages Proxy Mobile IPv6 protocol operations. We develop an analytic model of the signaling and packet delivery costs, as well as the handover latency of both Proxy Mobile IPv6 and our distributed solution. We have also implemented a Linux-based prototype of our proposal, which has been used to experimentally assess the handover latency in a real IEEE 802.11 scenario. Finally, we use the results obtained from the analytic and experimental performance to evaluate the benefits that could be achieved by deploying a distributed mobility management solution.7eng© 2014 IEEE. Personal use is permitted, but republication/redistribution requires IEEE permission.Distributed mobility managementIP mobilityPMIPv6Wireless systemsCellular architectureHandover mechanismsExperimental evaluationresearch articleTelecomunicacioneshttps://doi.org/10.1109/TMC.2014.2307304open access2484112497IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON MOBILE COMPUTING13AR/0000015772