Distributed mobility management scheme for mobile IPv6

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).