A Comparative Analysis of Distributed Mobility Management Schemes for 5G-Based Intelligent Transportation Systems

Current literature has identified several issues with centralized mobility management in 5G-based Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS), where 5G-enabled vehicles are expected to exhibit varying mobility patterns. So, distributed mobility management (DMM), where control plane mobility anchors work in a distributed fashion, is of keen interest to current researchers. Although existing DMM solutions, such as distributed mobile IPv6 (DMIPv6), distributed proxy MIPv6 (DPMIPv6), distributed mobility management software defined networking (SDN-DMM), distributed routing (D-Routing), and their derivatives appear to work fine in evolving 5G-based ITS, they cannot be applied directly. Further, to gauge their adaptability to different ITS scenarios, a thorough investigation of their performances is very much needed. Our key contributions in this paper include investigating DMM issues in 5G-based ITS scenarios, porting DMM schemes in 5G ITS, and developing a Markov model to evaluate handoff performance. The results show that DMIPv6 and DPMIPv6 outperform SDN-DMM and D-Routing in terms of end-to-end delay and signaling cost, with the latter increasing delay by 6-23% and signaling cost by 135% and 78%, respectively. However, SDN-DMM and D-Routing excel in packet loss ratio (15-20% lower), throughput (20-25% higher), and packet delivery cost (40% lower). In edge cloud flow mobility, SDN-DMM and D-Routing show better packet loss ratio as packet loss is caused by servers’ sensitive application delays rather than handoffs.