An Efficient Fault Tolerance Protocol with Backup Foreign Agents in a Hierarchical Local Registration Mobile IP

Abstract

A Mobile IP allows IP hosts to move between different networks without changing their IP addresses. Mobile IP systems supporting local registration were introduced to reduce the number of times a home registration with the remotely located home agent was needed. The local registration Mobile IP scheme enhanced performance by processing registration requests of mobile nodes at a local agent. The local registration approach may affect other aspects of the Mobile IP systems such as fault tolerance. In this paper, we briefly review previous solutions for supporting fault tolerance in local registration Mobile IP systems and propose a fault tolerance protocol with a backup foreign agent in a hierarchical local registration mobile IP to enhance the efficiency of such systems against foreign agent failures. We also describe the specification of the proposed protocol using LOTOS and perform its validation using MiniLite. Finally, we analyze the performance of our proposed fault tolerance protocol through simulation.