Threshold Load Balancing for Multiple Home Agents in Mobile IP Networks

In a continuously expanding mobile and wireless networking environment, Mobile IP is the preferred standard responsible for providing Internet connectivity to roaming mobile nodes. Under certain conditions of traffic, such as in Mobile IP networks supporting multimedia applications, overhead can cause delays at the mobility agents, i.e. foreign and home agents. Several multiple home agents protocol extensions have been proposed to avoid potential bottlenecks in single home agents configurations. Such multiple home agents schemes allow the use of dynamic load balancing policies to further improve the overall performance. Load balancing actions consist of data flows being redirected to vacant servers (home agents), rather than packets being dequeued and moved among servers. In our paper, we provide a comprehensive performance study on a proposed multiple home agents protocol. In order to improve the system performance, we propose a novel threshold-based load balancing policy. A discrete event computer simulator is developed to study the system performance with the proposed load balancing policy. We also introduce two new tuning parameters, the number of information queue slices and the retry latency, by which we control the load balancing benefit over an optimal static policy under various system configu-