Mobility-Aware Mobile Router Selection and Address Management for IPv6 Network Mobility

Abstract

Network mobility (NEMO) extends IP mobility to moving networks, which are groups of nodes that often constitute a subnet of a mobile router (MR). To realize this collective mobility, there are a number of important issues such as addressing and multihoming. With the proliferation of mobile nodes connected to the Internet, the efficient allocation/deallocation of addresses is becoming a vital requirement. We propose a collaborative address management scheme for network mobility, where the home DHCPv6 agent of a mobile network performs prefix delegation, while the mobile DHCPv6 agent (in the mobile network) allocates the IPv6 address to each mobile node. Also, network mobility with multiple MRs is taken into consideration. To provide a mobile network that has multiple MRs with robust Internet connectivity, we propose mobility-aware mobile router selection schemes. The concept of “mobility awareness” refers to the capability of a moving network in a vehicle (e.g., a train) to pinpoint the most stable Internet connectivity, by choosing the mobile router based on the vehicle’s movement pattern. The simulation shows that the proposed scheme outperforms a round-robin mobile router selection scheme in terms of the amount of carried traffic.