MoRaRo: Mobile Router-Assisted Route Optimization for Network Mobility (NEMO) Support

The IETF (Internet Engineering Task Force) has developed a Network Mobility (NEMO) basic support protocol by extending the operation of Mobile IPv6 to provide uninterrupted Internet connectivity to the communicating nodes of mobile networks. The protocol uses a mobile router (MR) in the mobile network to perform prefix scope binding updates with its home agent (HA) to establish a bi-directional tunnel between the HA and MR. This solution reduces location-update signaling by making network movements transparent to the mobile nodes behind the MR. However, delays in data delivery and higher overheads are likely to occur because of sub-optimal routing and multiple encapsulation of data packets. To resolve these problems, we propose a mobile router-assisted route optimization (MoRaRo) scheme for NEMO support. With MoRaRo, a mobile node performs route optimization with a correspondent node only once, at the beginning of a session. After that the MR performs route optimization on behalf of all active mobile nodes when the network moves. The virtue of this scheme is that it requires only slight modification of the implementation of the NEMO basic support protocol at local entities such as the MR and mobile nodes of the mobile network, leaving entities in the core or in other administrative domains untouched. MoRaRo enables a correspondent node to forward packets directly to the mobile network without any tunneling, thus reducing packet delay and encapsulation overheads in the core network. To enable the scheme to be evaluated, we present the results of both theoretical analysis and simulation. key words: network mobility, NEMO basic support protocol, mobile router-assisted route optimization, MoRaRo, packet delivery efficiency