Efficient fault-tolerant protocol for mobility agents in mobile IP
Jinho Ahn, Chong‐Sun Hwang · 2005
As the number of mobile nodes registering with a network rapidly increases in Mobile IP, multiple mobility (home or foreign) agents can be allocated to each network in order to improve performance and availability. Previous fault-tolerant protocols to mask failures of the mobility agents have used passive replication techniques. However, they result in high failure-free latency during registration process if the number of mobility agents in the same network increases, and force each mobility agent to manage bindings of all the mobile nodes registering with its network. In this paper, we present a new fault-tolerant protocol using checkpointing and receiver-based pessimistic message logging techniques. The protocol achieves low failure-free latency even if the number of mobility agents in a network increases and improves scalability to a large number of mobile nodes registering with each network compared with the previous protocols. Additionally, the protocol allows each failed mobility agent to recover bindings of the mobile nodes registering with the mobility agent when it is repaired even if all the other mobility agents in the same network concurrently fail.