Mobility Agents: Avoiding the Signaling of Route Optimization on Large Servers

A foreseeable scenario is where, on the Internet, mobile IPv6 is deployed and a large percentage of the clients are mobile nodes. These mobile clients will communicate with large servers, which under the point of view of mobile IPv6 will be correspondent nodes. In mobile IPv6 if a mobile node wants to communicate with a correspondent node directly (route optimization) it must perform the return routability procedure which includes sending and receiving signaling messages, cryptographic calculations and storing a state. This procedure must be performed for each mobile client connection and for each handover. The return routability procedure would introduce a very significant load on these servers. Moreover the servers must be modified in order to support the route optimization of mobile IPv6. These issues may be a drawback for the deployment of mobile IPv6. In this paper we propose mobility agents, a centralized solution that performs route optimization on behalf the correspondent nodes. Mobility Agents reduce the deployment cost, do not require modifying the servers, they are compatible with NEMO and other mobility protocols. Moreover they allow deploying different extensions of mobile IPv6 such as optimized MIPv6 without modifying the correspondent nodes.