Rehoming Decision Algorithm: Design and Empirical Evaluation

Multihoming protocols, such as SCTP, HIP or SHIM6 provide a framework for multiple addresses management.In wireless environments, the set of the available address of multihomed nodes frequently changes due to handovers. Asa consequence, multihoming protocols are supposed to detect such changes and if necessary rehome their ongoing sessions.Nonetheless, current multihoming protocols do not provide a generic rehoming decision strategy that would trigger the rehoming process only when it is necessary. We present a rehoming decision strategy that can be used by any multihoming protocol.We implement and evaluate our proposal in an experimentalIPv6 testbed with the SHIM6 protocol over wireless networks.We demonstrate that our decision strategy avoids unnecessary rehoming and reduces the rehoming latency of more than 50%.