An Efficient Load Balancing of Mobile Access Gateways in Proxy Mobile IPv6 Domains

In Proxy Mobile IPv6, network entities such as mobile access gateway and local mobility anchor perform mobility on behalf of the mobile nodes. Thus, PMIPv6 decreases the handover latency and the network enables mobile nodes to receive mobility support although they do not have mobility protocol stack within them. However, when a large number of mobile nodes are attached to the PMIPv6 domain, or they attach to a specific MAG, an MAG easily suffers from heavy load. As the load over an MAG increases, the end-to-end transmission delay and the number of packet loss increase. Then the load leads to mobility failure. Yet, the current specification of PMIPv6 does not provide any solution for this problem. Thus, in this paper, we propose a load balancing scheme for the PMIPv6 network to balance the load over MAGs in the domain. It is shown in the simulation that the proposed scheme distributes loads over MAGs in a PMIPv6 domain and also reduces packet losses.