Host mobility management using combined MIPv6 and DNS for MANETs

A Mobile Ad hoc network (MANET) can operate either in infrastructure mode or stand-alone mode. As a user component of the MANET, a mobile node has a home IP address allocated by its home MANET gateway while the foreign MANET gateway allocates a temporary IP address when a mobile node visits the foreign MANET. Existing approaches handling mobility issues are MIPv6 as an IP layer protocol and Domain Name System as a name resolution application. However, they have been studied separately so far. In this paper, we suggest a solution to manage host mobility in the MANET environments by conceptually combining the MIPv6 and DNS by means of mobile Resource Record information that consist of domain name, home IP address and temporary IP address. When the visited foreign MANET changes its operation from stand-alone mode to infrastructure mode, our mobility management scheme goes back to normal operation after a certain amount of restoration time. Finally, we analyze the restoration time necessary for sending the pending mobile Resource Record information to the corresponding home MANET gateways.