Load Balancing in Mobile IPv6´s Correspondent Networks with Mobility Agents

A foreseeable scenario is where on the Internet mobile IPv6 is deployed and a large percentage of the clients are mobile nodes. These mobile clients will communicate with large servers, which under the mobile IPv6´s point of view, will be correspondent nodes. Usually large servers operate in servers farms with a load balancer device. Mobile clients can communicate with these servers through their home agent (a sub-optimal path) or directly by using the built-in mechanisms of mobile IPv6 route optimization. In this paper we detail an important incompatibility between the mobile IPv6´s route optimization and several load balancing techniques. This means that mobile clients need to revert to the sub-optimal path when communicating with these server farms. This issue reduces considerably the communications performance increasing the delay and the infrastructure load. Moreover it may be an important drawback when considering mobile IPv6´s deployment. In this paper we show which load balancing techniques are incompatible with route optimization and we propose a novel mobile entity that solves this issue for several load balancing techniques.