Supporting Nested NEMO networks with the Unified MANEMO Architecture

The NEMO basic support protocol is a home agent based technique (derived from mobile IPv6) that permits the mobility of a network of IPv6 devices to be supported through the use of a dedicated mobile router. This NEMO mobile router accepts connections from IPv6 nodes and transparently manages any IP mobility on their behalf, which means that as well as individual hosts, a NEMO mobile router can also accept connections from other NEMO mobile networks. When this occurs, the inter-connected NEMO mobile networks form a highly inefficient topology known as a nested NEMO network. In this paper we describe this concept and examine the properties of nested NEMO networks. In particular we highlight how their communication patterns differ from typical mobile ad hoc networks (MANET) and present example scenarios which demonstrate their potential application domain. We present the unified MANEMO architecture (UMA), a solution which has been developed in order to efficiently support these nested NEMO scenarios. Through varying experimental testbed configurations, we provide an evaluation of the protocols performance and demonstrate how our approach is able to be deployed over the current Internet architecture without requiring any augmentation to access networks or the core Internet infrastructure.