Performance Analysis of the REAchability Protocol for IPv6 Multihoming

There is ongoing work on the IETF aimed to provide support for different flavors of multihoming configurations, such as SHIM6 for multihomed sites, multiple CoAs support in MIP for multihomed mobile nodes and HIP for multihomed nodes and sites. A critical aspect for all the resulting multihoming protocols is to detect failures and gain information related with the paths available between two hosts. The Failure Detection and Locator Path Exploration Protocol (in short REAchability Protocol, REAP) being defined in the SHIM6 WG of the IETF is a good candidate to be included as a reachability detection component on protocols requiring this functionality. Performance study is performed by combining analytical estimations and simulations to evaluate its behavior and tune its main parameters.