Efficient dynamic load balancing for multiple home agents in Mobile IPv6 based networks

The current specification of Mobile IPv6 does not provide load balancing among multiple home agents on the home link. In this paper, we introduce a load balancing mechanism as an extension to Mobile IPv6 that provides an efficient dynamic load balancing among multiple home agents. It takes into account acceptable packet forwarding rate for each home agent, with the aim of reducing and preventing traffic bottlenecks at the home agent. The advantages of our load balancing mechanism over other protocols are transparent load balancing, reduced message overhead over the air interface, fair load distribution among the home agents, no service interruption in the upper layer applications during load balancing, efficient resource utilization, and increased overall system performance.