Mobility label based network: Mobility support in label switched networks with multi-protocol BGP

To support mobility the network control plane is required to detect changes in the mobile node’s location and distribute the new location information throughout the network thus enabling the forwarding plane to deliver traffic in an optimal manner. The network responsiveness to the mobile node movements can be generally thought of as the time elapsed between the moment the node’s location in the network has changed and the moment the reception of packets in the new location has resumed. This paper outlines an approach to handling the user mobility at the network layer in the context of multi-protocol label switched networks (MPLS). This new approach does not rely on the existing IP mobility management protocols such as Mobile IP and is instead based on the combination of multi-protocol BGP (MP-BGP) and MPLS. This paper proposes to introduce new protocol elements to MP-BGP to achieve mobility label distribution at the network control plane and the optimal packet delivery to the mobile node by the network forwarding plane using MPLS regardless of the IP protocol addressing and the associated logical network topology.