Designs and analysis of local mobility agents discovery, selection and failure detection for Mobile IPv6

This paper addresses the problem of local mobility management (LMM) for Mobile IPv6. First, the analysis on the conformance of the Hierarchical Mobile IPv6 (HMIPv6) to the fundamental LMM requirements set out in the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) Internet Drafts, is carried out. This paper then describes three of our proposed solutions for LMM namely, "route tracing", "en-route local mobility agents (LMA) recording", and "hop-by-hop LMA probing". These three proposals discover LMA along the transmission route from the mobile node to its home agent and select the furthest LMA, within the visited domain, for local registration. The first two proposals are built on the HMIPv6 LMA discovery mechanisms, whereas the "hop-by-hop LMA probing" is a standalone fully fledged novel design. The three proposals are analyzed for conformance to the fundamental LMM requirements for Mobile IPv6 and shown to satisfy most of the requirements, with the "hop-by-hop LMA probing" being the best compliance.