Proxy mobile IP with distributed mobility anchors

Existing wireless networks typically support mobility by routing via a mobility anchor in a home network, but such via routing can result in non-optimized routes. This paper proposes a method to distribute the functions of the mobility anchor to different networks to avoid such non-optimized routes. It proposes a distributed mobility anchors architecture consisting of home mobility anchors (H-MA) at the home networks and visited mobility anchors (V-MA) at the visited networks. It splits the functions of a mobility anchor into the logical functions of: (1) home network prefixes allocation, (2) location management (LM), and (3) mobility routing (MR). The V-MA performs MR function to avoid triangle routing problem in Proxy mobile IP, whereas the H-MA also performs the LM function. The needed location information of a mobile node (MN) is acquired by a V-MA from the H-MA only when a packet is first sent to the MN via the V-MA and are then cached at the V-MA to enable optimized MR for packets subsequently sent to the MN.