Optinets: an architecture to enable optimal routing for network mobility

Abstract

More and more people want to access the Internet and virtual private networks from anywhere at anytime. This has given rise to providing connectivity capabilities to commuters of public transportation systems. Internet access from moving vehicles has necessitated an architecture which relies upon a special entity, namely a mobile router to support the mobility of the entire network. This paper presents an optimal routing architecture for devices accessing the Internet through a mobile router deployed in such a mobile network. Our scheme takes into consideration all entities involved in a network mobility scenario and attempts to diffuse the mobility management load without burdening a single entity of the architecture. Our architecture has three main benefits. Firstly, it provides mechanisms for any type of mobile network node present in the network - mobility aware or mobility unaware - to communicate using optimal routes with their correspondent nodes. Secondly added functionality to the MIPv6 operation is neither required at the correspondent nodes nor at the mobile network nodes. Thirdly, our architecture reduces and diffuses the processing burden at the mobile routers and their home agents.