This master’s thesis is focused on IP mobility support for mobile users and their devices in IPv6-based wireless networks. Then the Mobile IPv6 (MIPv6) protocol was proposed for this purpose and that is also the main objective of the thesis. This consists of several basic sections and is organized as follows: The first one deals with the overview of the function of Mobile IP, which enables the mobility of nodes around the Internet, without a change of their original IP address. Moreover there are introduced the primary differences between MIPv6 and its previous version – i.e., MIPv4, proposed for IPv4-based environment. The second chapter of the master’s thesis thereafter describes detailed information about all the most important mechanisms and features of Mobile IPv6 and this way tries to explain principles of its functioning. Further the thesis analyses some of proposed MIPv6 extensions – i.e., Hierarchical Mobile IPv6 (HMIPv6), Mobile IPv6 Fast Handover (FMIPv6) a Fast Handover for HMIPv6 (F-HMIPv6) protocols, and mainly aim at signaling process during the handover of a mobile node. In the last main section of the master’s thesis an analytical method to evaluate the performance of IPv6-based mobility management protocols was proposed. Subsequently, this method is applied on the protocols which were mentioned above and are studied the effects of various network parameters on the performance of these protocols.

Next generation wireless systems have an IP-based infrastructure with the support of heterogeneous access technologies. One research challenge for next generation all-IP based wireless systems is to design intelligent mobility management techniques that take advantage of IP-based technologies to achieve global roaming between various access networks. To support global roaming, next generation wireless systems require the integration and interoperation of heterogeneous mobility management techniques. Mobility in a hierarchical structure or multilayered environment should be supported. The objective of this study is to develop new mobility management techniques for global roaming support in next generation all-IP based wireless systems. More specifically, new schemes for location management and paging in Mobile IP for network layer mobility support, and new schemes for location management and handoff management in heterogeneous overlay networks for link layer mobility support are proposed and evaluated. For network layer mobility support, a distributed and dynamic regional location management mechanism for Mobile IP is proposed. Under the proposed scheme, the signaling burden is evenly distributed and the regional network boundary is dynamically adjusted according to the up-to-date mobility and traffic load for each terminal. Next, a user independent paging scheme based on last-known location and mobility rate information for Mobile IP is proposed. The proposed scheme takes the aggregated behavior of all mobile users as the basis for paging. For link layer mobility support, an IP-based system architecture for the integration of heterogeneous mobility management techniques is proposed. Three location management schemes under this IP-based architecture are proposed. All the three schemes support user preference call delivery which is a very important feature of next generation wireless communications. A threshold-based enhancement method is also proposed to further improve the system performance. Finally, a hybrid resource allocation scheme for handoff management in wireless overlay networks is proposed. Under this scheme, the overall system resources can be optimally allocated when mobile users are covered by multiple overlay networks.