VHARP: Virtual Home Agent Reliability Protocol for Mobile IPv6 based Networks

Mobile IPv6 is an enabling platform for creating IP mobility in the evolution path towards next generation service offerings. Current specification of mobile IPv6 does not provide reliability in the network and there are other problems associated with it. In this paper, we introduce "virtual home agent reliability protocol" as a complete system architecture and extension to mobile IPv6 that supports reliability and offers solution to the reliability problems associated with mobile IPv6. We also present the results of several experiments to assess the performance of our solution. The main advantages of our protocol over other protocols are: reliable mobile IPv6 operation, transparent failure detection and recovery mechanisms, reduced message exchange, no service interruption in mobile applications, reduced workload, secure data transfer, improved overall system and application performance