Mobility anchor point discovery protocol for hierarchical mobile IPv6

In the operation of hierarchical mobile IPv6 (HMIP) (H. Soliman, et al., 2003), a mobile node (MN) is supposed to send binding updates (BUs) to the home agent (HA) and a mobility anchor point (MAP); therefore, a MAP discovery protocol is needed to facilitate MN discovery of MAPs. Two protocols were previously proposed in (H. Soliman, et al., 2003) for MAP discovery, however, in both protocols, all access routers (ARs) must issue router advertisements (RAs) with MAP information option fields in order for the MNs to receive them. In such MAP discovery protocols, ARs must be aware of HMIP operation for the advertising of MAP information. In this paper, we introduce a new MAP discovery protocol that is transparent to ARs. Such transparency would bring about wider applicability for HMIP than previously achieved, which is important from industrial and commercial viewpoints. In addition, we confirm that the proposed protocol meets the requirements, and we evaluate its performance by computer simulation.