Regulating user arrivals at a Mobile IP Home Agent

With the increasing levels of data usage in mobile cellular networks, Mobile IP and its variants serve as the de facto standard for mobility management. At high user loads, the Mobile IP Home Agent is unable to support registration requests within the required delay limit, leading to registration failures during peak user periods. The typical way of addressing this problem currently is to over-provision the Home Agent or to add multiple Home Agents with Load-Balancing in order to handle peak loads. In this paper, we propose an algorithm that regulates user arrivals by manipulating their registration lifetimes, thereby smoothing the arrival process at the Home Agent. Our proposed algorithm controls the variance in server loads very effectively with negligible computational and storage overhead. It also does not penalize users to register more often in order to satisfy the requirement of uniform load at the HA. Simulations with various user arrival and lifetime distributions show that our scheme is highly effective at the regulation of user registration load at the Home Agent.