Mobility Agents: Avoiding the Route Optimization Signaling on Large Servers

Mobile IPv6 has been designed by the IETF to provide mobility to the Internet. With mobility a user can move and change his point of attachment to the Internet without losing his network connections. If Mobile IPv6 was deployed on the Internet, typically Correspondent Nodes would be large servers of current content providers. These large servers have thousands of clients and in such scenario many of them would be mobile clients. In Mobile IPv6 if a Mobile Node wants to communicate with a Correspondent Node directly (Route Optimization) it must perform the Return Routability procedure which includes sending and receiving signaling messages, cryptographic calculations and storing a state. This procedure must be performed for each mobile client connection and for each handover. The Return Routability procedure would introduce a very significant load on these servers. Moreover the servers must be modified in order to support Mobile IPv6 Route Optimization. These issues may be a drawback for Mobile IPv6’s deployment. In this paper we propose Mobility Agents, a centralized solution that performs Route Optimization on behalf the Correspondent Nodes. Mobility Agents reduce the deployment cost, do not require modifying the servers, they can benefit NEetwork MObility (NEMO) and other mobility protocols and allow deploying different Mobile IPv6 extensions such as Optimized MIPv6 without modifying the Correspondent Nodes. Finally our proposal reduces the data packet overhead up to 25% compared with existing solutions.