Migrating home agents towards internet-scale mobility deployments

Abstract

While the IETF standardization process of the Mobile IPv6 and Network Mobility (NEMO) protocols is almost complete, their large-scale deployment is not yet possible. With these technologies, in order to hide location changes of the mobile nodes from the rest of the Internet, a specific router called a home agent is used. However, this equipment generates resilience and performance issues such as protocol scalability and longer paths. In order to solve these problems, we describe and analyze a new concept called Home Agent Migration. The main feature of this solution is the distribution of home agents inside the current Internet topology to reduce distances to end-nodes. As is usually done for anycast routing, they advertise the same network prefix from different locations; moreover they also exchange information about their associations with mobile nodes. This produces a Global Mobile eXchange (GMX), an overlay network that efficiently handles data traffic from and to mobile nodes, and operates home agents as would an Internet eXchange Point (IXP). When a correspondent node needs to exchange packets with a mobile node, the data traffic will be intercepted by its closest GMX home agent and redirected to the home agent to which the mobile node is bound.

A Flexible and Distributed Home Agent Architecture for Mobile IPv6-Based Networks

“…This section presents an analytical evaluation of our proposed scheme and a comparison with a network running Mobile IPv6 enhanced with existing solutions [4] [9][10] because their impact on the exterior BGP routing system scalability is unpredictable.…”

“…A different proposal, which does not require deploying redundant HAs on each Home Link, is the Virtual Mobility Control Domain protocol (VMCD) [9][10]. The VMCD protocol allows multiple HAs to be placed at different domains.…”

Mobility management solutions for current IP and future networks

“…This interesting solution [9] aims to improve the efficiency of MIPv6 and similar mobility protocols based on the use of HAs. It utilizes a distributed set of HAs and relies on anycast routing capability of the underlying network, which significantly limits possible deployment environments for this method.…”

“…The DMM concept (see e.g. Global Home Agent to Home Agent protocol [9]) can be applied to various mobility support protocols, including Mobile IP (MIP) and PMIP (Proxy Mobile IP) [10].…”

Intra-AS Performance Analysis of Distributed Mobility Management Schemes

“…Then, by grouping the AS data set into three groups based on the closeness centrality [8], it inferred best secondary MME installment locations for ASes in each group. The next paper [6] evaluated a few centralized and distributed MM schemes such as Global HAHA [9], Migrating HA [10], and Distributed MIP (DMIP) [11] in the global scale using a real AS level topology of the Internet available at the Center for Applied Internet Data Analysis (CAIDA) [12]. The results emphasize strengths of the novel DMM schemes which motivates the use of a fully distributed MM approach in addressing DMM [13].…”