Internet of Thing (IoT) or also referred to as IP-enabled wireless sensor network (IP-WSN) has become a rich area of research. This is due to the rapid growth in a wide spectrum of critical application domains. However, the properties within these systems such as memory size, processing capacity, and power supply have led to imposing constraints on IP-WSN applications and its deployment in the real world. Consequently, IP-WSN is constantly faced with issues as the complexity further rises due to IP mobility. IP mobility management is utilized as a mechanism to resolve these issues. The management protocols introduced to support mobility has evolved from host-based to network-based mobility management protocols. The presence of both types of solutions is dominant but depended on the nature of systems being deployed. The mobile node (MN) is involved with the mobility-related signaling in host-based protocols, while network-based protocols shield the host by transferring the mobility-related signaling to the network entities. The features of the IoT are inclined towards the network-based solutions. The wide spectrum of strategies derived to achieve enhanced performance evidently displays superiority in performance and simultaneous issues such as long handover latency, intense signaling, and packet loss which affects the QoS for the real-time applications. This paper extensively reviews and discusses the algorithms developed to address the challenges and the techniques of integrating IP over WSNs, the attributes of mobility management within the IPv4 and IPv6, respectively, and special focus is given on a comprehensive review encompassing mechanisms, advantages, and disadvantages on related work within the IPv6 mobility management. The paper is concluded with the proposition of several pertinent open issues which are of high research value.

A recent trend in wireless sensor network (WSN) research is the deployment of a mobile element (ME) for transporting data from sensor nodes to the base station (BS). This helps to achieve significant energy savings as it minimizes the communications required among nodes. However, a major problem is the large data gathering latency. To address this issue, the ME (i.e., vehicle) should visit certain rendezvous points (i.e., nodes) to collect data before it returns to the BS to minimize the data gathering latency. In view of this, we propose a rendezvous-based approach where some certain nodes serve as rendezvous points (RPs). The RPs gather data using data compression techniques from nearby sources (i.e., affiliated nodes) and transfer them to a mobile element when the ME traverses their paths. This minimizes the number of nodes to be visited, thereby reducing data gathering latency. Furthermore, we propose a minimal constrained rendezvous point (MCRP) algorithm, which ensures the aggregated data are relayed to the RPs based on three constraints: (i) bounded relay hop, (ii) the number of affiliation nodes, and (iii) location of the RP. The algorithm is designed to consider the ME’s tour length and the shortest path tree (SPT) jointly. The effectiveness of the algorithm is validated through extensive simulations against four existing algorithms. Results show that the MCRP algorithm outperforms the compared schemes in terms of the ME’s tour length, data gathering latency, and the number of rendezvous nodes. MCRP exhibits a relatively close performance to other algorithms with respect to power algorithms.

Providing a seamless handover in the Internet of Thing (IoT) applications with minimal efforts is a big challenge in mobility management protocols. Several research efforts have been attempted to maintain the connectivity of nodes while performing mobility-related signalling, in order to enhance the system performance. However, these studies still fall short at the presence of short-term continuous movements of mobile nodes within the same network, which is a requirement in several applications. In this paper, we propose an efficient group-based handoff scheme for the Mobile Nodes (MNs) in order to reduce the nodes handover during their roaming. This scheme is named Enhanced Cluster Sensor Proxy Mobile IPv6 (E-CSPMIPv6). E-CSPMIPv6 introduces a fast handover scheme by implementing two mechanisms. In the first mechanism, we cluster mobile nodes that are moving as a group in order to register them at a prior time of their actual handoff. In the second mechanism, we manipulate the mobility-related signalling of the MNs triggering their handover signalling simultaneously. The efficiency of the proposed scheme is validated through extensive simulation experiments and numerical analyses in comparison to the state-of-the-art mobility management protocols under different scenarios and operation conditions. The results demonstrate that the E-CSPMIPv6 scheme significantly improves the overall system performance, by reducing handover delay, signalling cost and end-to-end delay.

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.

Proxy Mobile IPv6 (PMIPv6) has become a credible member of pertinent research areas. This is attributed mainly to its capability of enabling mobility without imposing constraints or requirements on the mobile node (MN). This MN shield is enabled due to the transferring of mobility-related signaling to a new entity, which is called Mobile Access Gateway (MAG). However, associating MNs to a specific MAG inside the PMIPv6 network increases the MAG load probability. Thus, several research have enhanced the PMIPv6 protocol to improve its basic specifications and performance. Strategies include protocols, which apply the clustering technique to enhance the overall performance of the PMIPv6 in terms of routing, scalability, lifetime, and load balancing. The load balancing mechanism is considered in the non-clustered protocols. However, this mechanism has not been adopted in clustering-based protocols. Thus, pertaining to the load and the respective assignments is critical. In this article, to address these issues, a new load balancing mechanism is proposed among MAGs for Cluster-based Proxy Mobile IPv6 (CSPMIPv6) protocol. The signaling within the CSPMIPv6 has been enhanced to support the proposed load balancing mechanism. The proposed mechanism employs the inter- and intra-domain on a frequent basis to select the best MAG among the candidate MAGs. The new mechanism has improved the performance to create an evident improvement in terms of average queuing delay, handover latencies, transmission rate, end-to-end delay, and packet loss as compared to the LBM-PMIPv6 mechanism and CSPMIPv6 protocol.