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

This paper proposes a new mechanism of multiple home agents to realize a stable connection in Mobile IPv6. The new mechanism has multiple home agents instead of only one home agent in the existing specification of Mobile IPv6. In the existing Mobile IPv6 protocol, it takes time to find a new home agent and make it work. A mobile node cannot find that the home agent is down until the mobile node needs to register or update the binding information at the home agent. When a home agent is down and a mobile node is away from home and on a foreign link, the mobile node cannot receive any packets from a newly joining correspondent node. The new mechanism provides multiple home agents with a new binding update message and a new ICMP home agent unreachable error message. The new binding update procedure realizes a fast home agent recovery. This paper describes the result of an experiment which shows how a mobile node works with multiple home agents. We also compare the fast home agent recovery process with existing methods.

Mobile IPv6 is a key technology in IPv6 to support the mobility of wireless communication terminals. In mobile IPv6, home agents (HAs) are responsible for the registration of mobile nodes (MNs) in the home network, and tunneling the data packets to the MNs when the MNs are not reachable through its home IP addresses. However recent research shows that the traffic bottleneck could be formed at a HA. When the HA experiences high intensity of the tunneled traffic and the MH registration information. In this paper, we propose a hybrid load balance mechanism which takes account of not only the MN registration information but also the tunneled data traffic information to effectively release and prevent the formation of the traffic bottleneck at the HA. We show that the proposed mechanism can be implemented in mobile IPv6 without changing the protocols of the communication between HAs and MNs in IETF MIPv6 draft. Simulation shows that our proposed algorithm can reduce the traffic delay substantially and the buffer requirements during the tunneling traffic phase in mobile IPv6.

Fault-tolerant design for wide-area Mobile IPv6 networks

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.

Mobile IPv6 and Network Mobility (NEMO) have been standardized as IP extensions. While these technologies are planned to be adopted by several communities, such as the vehicle, aviation, and cellular industries, Mobile IPv6 has serious deployment issues such as scalability, protocol resilience, and redundancy. In these technologies, a special router called a home agent is introduced to support the movement of mobile nodes. This home agent introduces overlapping, inefficient routes, and becomes a single point of failure and a performance bottleneck. In this paper, a new concept for scalable and dependable mobility management scheme is proposed. Multiple home agents serve the same set of mobile nodes. The Home Agent Reliability protocol and Home Agent migration are introduced to achieve this concept. We also propose an overlay network named a Global Mobile eXchange (GMX) that efficiently handles data traffic from and to mobile nodes, and operates home agents as would an Internet eXchange Point (IXP).

Mobility support in IP networks requires servers to forward packets to mobile hosts and to maintain information pertaining to a mobile host's location in the network. In the mobile Internet Protocol (mobile-IP), location and packet forwarding functions are provided by servers referred to as home agents. These home agents may become the bottleneck when there are a large number of mobile hosts in the network. In this paper, we consider the design and analysis of a replicated server architecture in which multiple home agents are used to provide mobility support. In order to minimize the delay across the home agents, one of the key aspects is the design of load balancing schemes in which a home agent may transfer the control of a mobile host to another home agent in the same network. The methods for triggering the transfer and the policy for selecting the next home agent define various load balancing schemes which have different performance characteristics. In this paper, we design a protocol that forms the building block for implementing such load balancing schemes, and we then study the performance characteristics of random, round-robin, and join the shortest queue (JSQ) selection policies, and timer-, counter- and threshold-based transfer policies.

To maintain the Internet connectivity of a group of nodes in intelligent transportation systems (ITSs), the network mobility basic support (NEMO BS) protocol was standardized. The NEMO BS provides mobility for mobile network nodes (MNNs) in a moving network through a mobile router (MR). Since packet loss in NEMO dramatically increases during a handover as the number of MNNs increases, Mobile IPv6 fast handovers (FMIPv6) was adopted to reduce packet loss and handover latency. However, since FMIPv6 was originally designed for a single mobile node (MN), FMIPv6 based on NEMO (fNEMO) incurs a high tunneling burden on the link between the previous and new access routers (PAR and NAR, respectively). In this paper, we propose an enhanced fNEMO (EfNEMO) as an efficient fast handover scheme that significantly mitigates the tunneling burden and handover latency. In particular, EfNEMO performs a tentative binding update (BU) procedure to register a new care-of address (NCoA) for the MR with the MR's home agent (HA) before the layer-2 handover. Consequently, EfNEMO delivers packets destined for MNNs via various paths between the HA and the NAR without any tunneling. Furthermore, EfNEMO reduces handover latency because it performs the registration to the HA in advance. By establishing an analytical model for the proposed EfNEMO, we investigate the handover performance of NEMO, fNEMO, and EfNEMO. In addition, we compare EfNEMO with NEMO and fNEMO in terms of the overall cost and the handover latency. Simulation is also performed to compare in a more realistic environment. The results of analysis and simulation show that EfNEMO significantly outperforms fNEMO and NEMO.

Hierarchical Mobile IPv6 (HMIPv6) introduces a mobility anchor point (MAP) that localizes the signaling traffic and hence reduces the handoff latency. In addition to processing binding update messages from mobile nodes (MNs) on behalf of MNs' home agents (HAs), the MAP performs data traffic tunneling destined to or originated from MNs, both of which will burden the MAP substantially as the network size grows. To provide scalable and robust mobile Internet services to a large number of visiting MNs, multiple MAPs will be deployed. In such an environment, how to select an appropriate MAP has a vital effect on the overall network performance. In this paper, we propose the multiple level MAP selection scheme in the form of binary tree structure. Then, we give the optimal threshold value calculation formula, which is used to select the MAP for MN. We compare its performance quantitatively in terms of signaling overhead. It can be shown that the multiple level MAP selection scheme is better than the furthest and the nearest MAP selection schemes in some area, since the this scheme can select the serving MAP depending on the MN's mobility.

Mobile nodes are changing their point of attachment dynamically such as a network deployed in an aircraft, a boat, a train, or a car. These mobile nodes move together and share the same mobility properties. Therefore, this paper addresses an efficient location management scheme that utilizing for mobile nodes to move as a group. Our proposed method adds Server Mobile Node(SMN) to the existing Mobile IPv6 protocol, which maintains the functioning of mobile communication and stores the necessary information there. By implementing this method, it is expected that the lifetime of the mobile nodes re-setting efficiently. By combining the multicast routing with Mobile IPv6 method, in addition, the number of the binding upgrade(BU) messages produced in the home agent and CNs will not increase almost, although the number of the mobile nodes increases. We address the key functions for our proposed scheme including system configuration, location registration, and packet delivery. Our analytical model shows the usefulness of our proposed mechanism using analytical models and compares the results with the previous researches.

The current deployment of wireless mesh networks requires mobility management to track the current locations of mobile nodes around the network without service interruption. To do so, the Hierarchical Mobile IPv6 protocol has been chosen, which minimises the required signalling by introducing a new entity called the mobile anchor point to act as a local home agent for all visiting mobile nodes in a specific domain. It allows a mobile node to register its local/regional care-of addresses with a mobile anchor point by sending a local binding update message. However, the local binding update is quite sensitive; it modifies the routing to enable mobility in the wireless mesh networks. When a local binding update message is spoofed, an attacker can redirect traffic that is destined for legitimate mobile node either to itself or to another node. This situation leads to an increased risk of attacks. Therefore, this paper contributes to addressing this security issue based on wireless mesh networks by cryptography generation and verification of a mobile node’s local and regional care-of addresses, as well as the application of a novel method to verify the reachability of mobile node at claimed local care-of address. This is called the enhanced mobile anchor point registration protocol. The Scyther tool has been used to ensure the proposed protocol accuracy. Furthermore, the performance, in terms of the mobile anchor point registration delay and signalling overhead, is evaluated by using the OPNET modeller simulator.

The mobile IP protocol has been designed to address the problem of roaming between IP networks. However, as mobile nodes moves between networks, the signaling overhead causes significant disruption to real time data traffic. The localized mobility management (LMM) has been proposed to enhance the handoff performance between networks within the same domain. By introducing the concept of local mobility agent (LMA), a mobile node visiting a foreign domain is exempted from sending frequent address update to its home agent and correspondent nodes, when its movement is limited to the visited domain. As multiple LMAs are configured in a domain for redundancy, scalability and load sharing concerns, LMA selection becomes an issue. This paper proposed a new LMA selection algorithm, mobile controlled movement tracking (MCMT). The objective of this new algorithm is to discover the optimal LMA in terms of selection stability and load balancing, by taking into consideration the mobility characteristics of the mobile node. Our analysis shows that this proposal can provide good support for low latency handoff and load sharing among LMAs.

In MIPv6, whenever a mobile node changes its attached point, handover process should be followed to inform its home agent and correspondent of the mobile node's current location. The handover process is decomposed into layer 2 and layer 3 handovers again, and these two handovers are accomplished sequentially, which causes long latency problem. This problem is a critical issue in MIPv6. To make up for this, we propose an enhanced fast handover scheme to reduce the overall latency on handover, revising the fast handover [1]. Especially, several messages in layer 3 are sent in one frame during layer 2 handover. We use cost analysis for the performance evaluation. Compared to MIPv6 handover scheme, the proposed scheme gains 79% improvement while it gains 31% improvement, compared to the fast handover.

When Mobile IPv6 is deployed in commercial network, a mobile node needs AAA services for authentication, authorization and accounting. AAA and Mobile IPv6 are operated independently. Hence schemes which merge these protocols have been emerged. These schemes enable the mobile node to establish a security association between the mobile node and a home agent, and to perform a home binding update during AAA authentication procedure. But these schemes introduce lots of signal messages and long handover latency during the handover, since Route Optimization mode for Mobile IPv6 is performed using Return Routability procedure. To solve this problem, we propose an optimized scheme which performs Route Optimization mode via the AAA infrastructure between the home agent and a correspondent node instead of Return Routability procedure. For performance evaluation, we analyze handover latency in three scenarios. We then show that the proposed scheme reduces handover latency like the average of 58% compared with the existing scheme

The majority of research on MIPv6 only considers the mobility of nodes. However, using MIPv6 for mobile network will introduce a problem such as dog-leg routing. A mobile network is composed with one or more visited mobile networks as well as mobile nodes in fixed network environment. In order to communicate from foreign network with mobile nodes, packets are usually transmitted via the home link of the mobile node. This introduces a dog-leg routing. Especially, the increasing number of visited mobile network may cause a transmission delay for the packet. Dog-leg routing may cause a transmission latency, this subsequently causes the difficulty for a real time service and the delay in binding update. Our research tries to solve the dog-leg routing by only expanding AR (access router), MR (mobile router), HA (home agent) of MR without any changes in MN, HA of MN and CN. The second part of my research outlines the performance which reduces binding update latency and the number of binding update message through regional registration.

A secure and efficient mobile IP (MIP) registration protocol using certificateless signature scheme is proposed. The protocol minimises the registration time through minimal usage of an efficient certificateless signature scheme between a foreign agent (FA) and a home agent (HA). Protocol parameters can be kept resynchronised by reusing the initial values in the MIP registration in case the synchronisation between a mobile node (MN) and HA is lost. User anonymity is achieved via a temporary identity transmitted by a mobile user, instead of its true identity. Additional replay protection from the FA is included in the registration messages to prevent a possible replay attack. Numerical results and performance analyses demonstrate that the proposed protocol outperforms the existing ones in terms of the registration time, registration signalling traffic and computational load on an MN while providing improved security. For example, the proposed protocol reduces the registration time up to ∼83% compared with the protocol from Yang.