Agent-based route optimization for mobile IP

The need for mobility support on existing networks led to the formulation of the mobile IP protocol, which can provide seamless connectivity between fixed and mobile nodes. However, the inherent drawbacks of the protocol led to route optimization proposals of which one was accepted by the IETF. While attempting to solve the triangle routing problem, the adopted route optimization places extra constraints on the network nodes. This work is motivated by the need to find an alternative solution that would effectively solve the triangle routing problem without sacrificing performance, transparency, and simplicity. The proposed solution is an agent-based route optimization, which moves the tasks of maintaining and updating binding caches and encapsulating messages away from individual correspondent nodes to the correspondent agents. We setup a simulation environment to evaluate the proposed methodology. Simulation results show that the proposed protocol outperforms the existing protocols in terms of system message complexity, protocol simplicity, and scalability.