ROAD+: Route Optimization with Additional Destination-Information and Its Mobility Management in Mobile Networks

Abstract

In the NEtwork MObility (NEMO) environment, mobile networks can form a nested structure. In nested mobile networks that use the NEMO Basic Support (NBS) protocol, pinball routing problems occur because packets are routed to all the home agents of the mobile routers using nested tunneling. In addition, the nodes in the same mobile networks can communicate with each other regardless of Internet connectivity. However, the nodes in some mobile networks that are based on NBS cannot communicate when the network is disconnected from the Internet. In this paper, we propose a route optimization scheme to solve these problems. We introduce a new IPv6 routing header named “destination-information header” (DH), which uses DH instead of routing header type 2 to optimize the route in the nested mobile network. The proposed scheme shows at least 30% better performance than ROTIO and similar performance improvement as DBU in inter-route optimization. With respect to intra-route optimization, the proposed scheme always uses the optimal routing path. In addition, the handover mechanism in ROAD+ outperforms existing schemes and is less sensitive to network size than other existing schemes.