Over the last few years, IP-based mobility management in the Internet has been one of the most active research fields in communications. Mobility management protocols are responsible for maintaining the ongoing communications while the user roams among distinct networks and also to provide reachability to the mobile users in such heterogeneous environment in terms of access. Existing IP mobility support protocols are all based on a centralized mobility anchor that manages the traffic and signaling of the mobile nodes. However, centralized mobility management protocols need to be redesigned in order to cope with the recent trends in mobile Internet and current increasing mobile data traffic demand.In order to address these limitations which inherently occur in Centralized Mobility Management (CMM) protocols, Distributed Mobility Management (DMM) solutions are being developed to efficiently handle the current mobile traffic explosion. In DMM, the core idea is that the mobility anchors are distributed within the network, topologically closer to the users, with the aim to provide an almost optimal routing support and an efficient use of network resources to improve the scalability required for next generation mobile networks.However, and as already alluded above, despite the fact that a number of mobility management approaches are in-design phase towards a more distributed operation aiming to mitigate the problems related to centralized operation, there are instances where DMM incurs higher costs and the performance of the network might be compromised. In fact, in some of these cases, CMM seems to solve the mobility problem more efficiently and therefore should be preferred. In this context, future mobile network architectures might potentially exhibit a hybrid centralized-distributed behavior in which the mobility management of some traffic will be kept centralized, while mobility support for other applications can be distributed. To cope with this evolution, the thesis concerns analysing, designing, and evaluating IPv6 mobility management protocols. Specifically, we propose three novel approaches which cover each of this evolutionary stage. Our first scheme, LinkWork Mobile MPLS is a centralized solution. The second proposal called DM3 is based on the distributed paradigm. Finally, the third proposal is a Hybrid DMM solution, suitable to tackle future mobile network architectures. In order to evaluate the proposed schemes, we carry out analysis and simulations to measure the performance of the protocols in terms of mobility cost and handover latency.
