A hybrid load balance mechanism for distributed home agents in mobile IPv6

Mobile IPv6 is a key technology in IPv6 to support the mobility of wireless communication terminals. In mobile IPv6, home agents (HAs) are responsible for the registration of mobile nodes (MNs) in the home network, and tunneling the data packets to the MNs when the MNs are not reachable through its home IP addresses. However recent research shows that the traffic bottleneck could be formed at a HA. When the HA experiences high intensity of the tunneled traffic and the MH registration information. In this paper, we propose a hybrid load balance mechanism which takes account of not only the MN registration information but also the tunneled data traffic information to effectively release and prevent the formation of the traffic bottleneck at the HA. We show that the proposed mechanism can be implemented in mobile IPv6 without changing the protocols of the communication between HAs and MNs in IETF MIPv6 draft. Simulation shows that our proposed algorithm can reduce the traffic delay substantially and the buffer requirements during the tunneling traffic phase in mobile IPv6.