Fault tolerance for home agents in mobile IP

In the conventional IP protocol, whenever a mobile device moves to a different network, it must change its IP address to communicate with other nodes in the Internet. Mobile IP protocol keeps mobile nodes online without changing their IP addresses while changing the attachment points. The packets destined to mobile nodes (MN) are relayed by their home agents (HA). However, once the only one HA fails, all MNs managed by the HA will not receive packets normally. In the paper, we propose a novel protocol with multiple mobile agents (MA) where only double mobility bindings are maintained in the whole system. When an HA is failed, its backup HA can take over it in a short time without fetching the bindings from other places. Besides, we also consider the load balancing between these HAs during HA takeover and recovery. Through the simulation and analyses, we found that our method has less registration overheads, better MN-scalability, less sensitivity on MN mobility, more fault-tolerance robustness, and less takeover time than others.