Investigation of Home Agent Load Balancing, Failure Detection and Recovery in IPv6 Network-based Mobility

Abstract

Mobile IPv6 came as an extensively acknowledged technology to support mobility in networks. Home agents are in charge for the registration of mobile devices and act as a key entity for the tunneling of data packets to the corresponding registered mobile nodes. A single home agent has an administrative control over the critical tasks including home agent registration management, maintenance of cache data and tunneling of data packets to the mobile nodes that are away from their home networks and so on. However in this approach, home agent act as the sole failure point, which gave rise to the placement of multiple home agents to overcome this issue. The load balancing mechanism for multiple home agent deployment faces the problem of improper load sharing, signaling overhead and synchronization issues. Moreover, failure detection and recovery mechanism is inefficient in nature. It experiences a significant delay in tunneling of data packets and suffers from disconnection making it incompetent for the use in real time applications. Hence, this paper investigates and analyzes the various load balancing mechanisms of mobile IPv6. In addition, it presents the comparative study of the failure detection and recovery mechanism of existing methods. Finally, it concludes that future work can be extended in the domain of distributed active load sharing mechanism and proactive failure detection.