Load balancing mechanism for Proxy Mobile IPv6 networks: An IP multicast perspective

In Proxy Mobile IPv6 (PMIPv6), the local mobility anchor (LMA) is responsible for maintaining the mobile node´s (MN) reachability state and forwarding traffic from/to the current location of the MN. With the explosion of the mobile terminals as well as the traffic, it is easy to make the LMA a bottleneck and single point of failure. Load balancing (LB) mechanism among LMAs is a promising solution for these issues. However, the existing LB proposals have neglected the multicast service which may degrade their efficiency when considering IP multicast. Furthermore, applying LB mechanism can raise several issues not only for ongoing unicast sessions but also multicast ones. To tackle these issues, a new LB solution which mainly focuses on the multicast service is proposed. The experiments and the numerical results show that this solution helps to better distribute the load among the LMAs while greatly reducing the multicast service disruption as well as avoiding the influence on the ongoing unicast sessions caused by LB. In addition, the proposed solution can co-operate with the existing LB proposals to improve the performance of the network.