Mobile MPLS with route optimization: The proposed protocol and simulation study

Mobile MPLS, as the integration of Mobile IP and MPLS (Multiprotocol Label Switching), has the benefits of having mobility support from Mobile IP and quality of service support from MPLS. These benefits are important to mobile networks carrying various Internet services to mobile users. Nevertheless, Mobile MPLS inherits a problem of routing inefficiency called triangle routing from Mobile IP. This paper proposes a route optimization protocol to overcome this problem in Mobile MPLS. By adding a correspondent agent function to Mobile MPLS's edge routers, the mobility binding of a mobile node can be cached by the edge routers and the packet routing to the mobile node can be route-optimized. We evaluate our proposal by implementing it on the Network Simulator (NS-2). The simulation results indicate that the proposed route optimization has improved the performance of Mobile MPLS by reducing its end-to-end delay.