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

Home Agents (HA) represent a single point of failure for Mobile IPv6-based networks. To overcome this problem many solutions have been published providing reliable HA architectures. These solutions require deploying redundant HAs on each sub-network. Although these solutions effectively mitigate this problem, they do not take into account the requirements of large networks with dozens of sub-networks. Deploying several HAs on each sub-network may be too expensive to deploy and to manage. In this paper we present a novel HA architecture that only requires a set of HAs for the whole network. Our basic idea is that the Mobile Node’s location can be announced to exit routers, this way re-directing packets can be done without involving the HA. Our solution provides reliability and load balancing as the existing solutions. Finally, we validate our proposal through an analytical model and compare it against other proposals through a simulation.