Design of a Failure Detection and Recovery method for multi-homing in HIP

The Host Identity Protocol (HIP) is an ID/Locator split based scheme which aims at solving challenges as multi-homing, mobility, etc. Multi-homed host has many advantages, such as fault-tolerance, load sharing and so on. However, multi-homing in current Internet is achieved at the cost of strong pressure to the routing table of Default Free Zone, and now HIP also still left problems such as fault-tolerance in multi-homing for further study. There are three key problems of fault-tolerance in HIP multi-homing communication: how to detect link failures, when to process a locator switching, and how to recover the communication. In this paper, we describe a Failure Detection and Recovery (FDR) mechanism to solve these problems to achieve fault-tolerance capability in HIP multi-homing. In FDR, we introduce two timers and make a two-direction confirmation to detect link failures, and then give a method that changing the preferred locator of multi-homed hosts for link recovery. Finally, we present the design of our FDR simulation framework, which is based on HIP Sim++ of OMNeT-H-simulation environment The simulation results show that multi-homed hosts in HIP can detect the potential failures and switch to another link, under the support of FDR.