Inter-Domain Roaming Mechanism Transparent to IPv6-Node among PMIPv6 Networks

Proxy Mobile IPv6 (PMIPv6) is designed to provide mobility service to IPv6-nodes in a network domain by network-based management which does not require the nodes to be involved in IP mobility management. In other words, the PMIPv6 can support roaming within a PMIPv6 domain, i.e. intra-domain roaming, transparent to mobile nodes. Recently, next generation wireless networks, such as 802.16e and Super 3G/3.9G, adopt the PMIPv6 as a management solution of the IP mobility. Such extensive adoption of the PMIPv6 might lead to frequent roaming of IPv6-nodes not only within a PMIPv6 domain but also between PMIPv6 domains. However, for the roaming between PMIPv6 domain, i.e. inter-domain roaming, existing solutions take interworking between PMIPv6 and MIPv6 into consideration. It means that every mobile node should involve IP mobility management although the nodes merely move around among PMIPv6 domains which provide the transparent node mobility service. Hence, we propose a network-based roaming mechanism between PMIPv6 domains to offer transparent mobility support to IPv6-nodes. The inter-domain mechanism takes into account concatenated tunnels between home domain and visited domain. The tunnels would be established by signaling among routers in the home and visited PMIPv6 network domains.