An Implementation of Multiple Home Agents Mechanism in Mobile IPv6

This paper proposes a new mechanism of multiple home agents to realize a stable connection in Mobile IPv6. The new mechanism has multiple home agents instead of only one home agent in the existing specification of Mobile IPv6. In the existing Mobile IPv6 protocol, it takes time to find a new home agent and make it work. A mobile node cannot find that the home agent is down until the mobile node needs to register or update the binding information at the home agent. When a home agent is down and a mobile node is away from home and on a foreign link, the mobile node cannot receive any packets from a newly joining correspondent node. The new mechanism provides multiple home agents with a new binding update message and a new ICMP home agent unreachable error message. The new binding update procedure realizes a fast home agent recovery. This paper describes the result of an experiment which shows how a mobile node works with multiple home agents. We also compare the fast home agent recovery process with existing methods.