Mobile IPv6 (MIPv6) is a host‐based mobility support specification which has been approved by the IETF as the standardized solution of global mobility management in IPv6 network for Mobile Node (MN). However, MIPv6 handover procedure results in a large handover delay. To improve its performance, some MIPv6 variants such as Fast Handover for MIPv6 (FMIPv6) and Hierarchical MIPv6 (HMIPv6) were proposed. However, they all require the MN to support the mobility management protocols which increase the difficulty of management and deployment. Recently, IETF NETLMM workgroup published the Proxy Mobile IPv6 (PMIPv6) which is a network‐based localized mobility management to provide the mobility support for mobile host without the involvement of the mobility signaling. In this paper, we analyze the singling cost of PMIPv6 and implement it in our test‐bed to evaluate its performance. The results show that the PMIPv6 has lower signaling cost and packet delivery cost, and it can improve the handover performance of UDP and TCP than the other mobility management protocols under low‐delay networks, as for the wide area networks, it needs to introduce some mechanism like fast handover to further improve its performance. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.