A multi-anchoring approach in mobile IP networks

Many recent mobility solutions, including derivatives of the well-known Mobile IP as well as emerging protocols employed by future Internet architectures, propose to realize mobility management by distributing anchoring nodes Home Agents or other indirection agents over the Internet. One of their main goals is to address triangle routing by optimizing routes between mobile nodes and correspondent nodes. Thus, a key component of such proposals is the algorithm to select proper mobility anchoring nodes for mobile nodes. However, most current solutions adopt a single-anchoring approach, which means each mobile node attaches to a sole mobility anchor at one time. In this paper, "we argue that the single-anchoring approach has drawbacks when facing various mobility scenarios. Then, we offer a novel multi-anchoring approach that allows each mobile node to select an independent mobility anchor for each correspondent node. We show that in most cases our proposal gains more performance benefits with an acceptable additional cost by evaluation based on real network topologies. For the cases that lead to potential high cost, we also provide a lightweight version of our solution which aims to preserve most performance benefits while keeping a lower cost. At last, we demonstrate how our proposal can be integrated into current Mobile IP networks. Copyright © 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.