Enhanced mobile node’s reachability through anycasting for MIPv6 regional registrations

Mobile IPv6 (MIPv6) provides an efficient solution to solve the wide-area host mobility problem. MlPv6´s registration process introduces overhead in case of local-area mobility when coupled with a high rate of change of the mobile node´s point of attachment. Regional-aware router hierarchies along with a regional registration framework have been introduced to reduce binding update overhead for local-area mobility. In this paper, a framework which leverages IPv6 anycasting functionality is introduced to enhance MIPv6 regional registrations. The novel framework is designed to promote fault tolerance and improve the mobile node´s reachability in the foreign domain. Roots of regional-aware router hierarchies are members of the same anycast group where the anycast address is the care-of address for mobile nodes. Mobility management state is accessible from all hierarchies either through push data replication among roots of regional-aware router hierarchies or by deploying a mobility support service in the foreign domain. Our framework enables the mobile node to be reachable, while moving across domain hierarchies, even if the domain suffers from n-1 failures of hierarchies´ roots where n is the number of hierarchies in the domain.