Design, Implementation and Performance Evaluation of a Home Agent Redundancy Solution

The specifications of the protocols supporting mobility - MIPv6, NEMO - centralize their key functionalities on the home agent, which represents a single point of failure. In the context of the French research project REMORA, we have developed a solution to make home agent-based mobility protocols more reliable against the home agent failures. This paper presents the design, the implementation and the performance evaluation of a solution for home agent redundancy, which is based on a set of synchronized home agents running a protocol for failure detection and recovery. First, the protocol has been specified and designed, based on ongoing IETF drafts. Second, a fully operational prototype has been implemented and its performances have been validated and assessed on a large-scale test bed as proof-of-concept.