# Tunnel-Free Distributed Mobility Management (DMM) Support Protocol for Future Mobile Networks
## 1 Introduction
[21] have addressed the issue of overloaded AP or a mobility anchor and access router due to an increase in the number of MNs attaching to them. They have proposed mobile edge computing (MEC) as a solution to this issue. Their research introduces a MEC-assisted technique that facilitates early handovers using full DMM. Their proposition is to force a MN into performing an early handover by defining trigger-timing. Furthermore, to sidestep the unbalanced network, a decision is made regarding the MN suitable for early handovers. [PERSON], [PERSON] et al. [22] have focused on the limited performance and increased cost issues of DMM protocols in the event of a short cell-residence time. They have proposed an approach that is based on fast handover concepts, locator identifier separation protocol, and local mobility anchoring for 5G dense small cells. The proposed technique splits up a local domain into many location service areas, where a local anchor controls each area. They have analyzed their protocol in terms of different handover parameters like handover latency, total signaling cost, packet loss, and data delivery cost, improving the performance of each parameter. All these proposed DMM approaches have tried in their own way to provide mobility services to a MN in a distributed manner, proving that a distributed approach best suits the current mobile networks' needs rather than the centralized approach. On the other hand, DMM also faces many challenges when it comes to practical deployment. One of the major challenges is managing tunneling when providing session continuity to a MN. With tunneling comes other problems as well, such as the management of multiple IPs, the registration delay and signaling overhead as a result of increasing tunnels, the network configuration and resource management, and some security considerations. All the DMM schemes discussed above use the concept of tunneling, and hence face the issues and problems mentioned above. The main contributions of this research include the proposition of a framework that provides a tunnel-free DMM support protocol for mobile networks and then comparing it with the existing IPv6 mobility management protocols. The endorsement of a flat network architecture, as opposed to the hierarchical network architecture, is made to overcome the limitations of a centralized core network architecture. There is also no hassle in terms of tunnel management and address management. Endorsement of network scalability is done through a DMM approach. Lastly, communications and transmissions are made more seamless by mitigating the delays involved in the process, e.g., with no tunneling involved, there will not be additional registration delays. With the conducted analysis in this research, it confirms that the proposed tunnel-free DMM support protocol results in a considerably mitigated and reduced handover delay, which produces a reduced handover blocking probability and data packet loss. The rest of the paper is organized as follows. Section 2 explains the proposed tunnel-free DMM support protocol. Section 3 discusses the analytical modelling and performance evaluation. Section 4 discusses the numerical analysis and results. Section 6 concludes the paper.