P2P Based Architecture for Global Home Agent Dynamic Discovery in IP Mobility

Mobility in packet networks has become a critical issue in the last years. Mobile IP and the network mobility basic support protocol are the IETF proposals to provide mobility. However, both of them introduce performance limitations, due to the presence of an entity (home agent) in the communication path. Those problems have been tried to be solved in different ways. A family of solutions has been proposed in order to mitigate those problems by allowing mobile devices to use several geographically distributed home agents (thus making shorter the communication path). These techniques require a method to discover a close home agent, among those geographically distributed, to the mobile device. This paper proposes a peer-to-peer based solution, called peer-to-peer home agent network, in order to discover a close home agent. The proposed solution is simple, fully global, dynamic and it can be developed in IPv4 and IPv6.