Introducing Reliability and Load Balancing in Home Link of Mobile IPv6 based Networks

Mobile IPv6 provides support for multiple home agents on a single home link. This home link is single point of failure for mobile IPv6. Current specifications of mobile IPv6 does not provide solution to the home link failure problems. In this paper, we introduce "virtual home link" as an extension to mobile IPv6. It provides reliability and load balancing among the home links by introducing home link redundancy in the home network. It also provides solution to the home link failure problems. We present the results of several experiments to assess the performance of our solution. The results show that our solution provides transparent and home agent initiated home link failure detection, recovery and load balancing mechanisms. There is a significant reduction in message exchange over the air interface. Also, it provides high service availability in the upper layer applications. The home link failure recovery is fast and efficient. Moreover, there is reduced workload on the mobile node. Finally, the load balancing mechanism of our solution provides efficient, dynamic and transparent load balancing among multiple home links. Thus, our solution improves the overall mobile IPv6 and upper layer applications performance