Proactive autonomic load uniformisation with mobility management for wireless Internet Protocol (IP) access networks

Abstract

The agent micro-mobility protocols, such as Hierarchical Mobile IPv6 and Proxy Mobile IPv6, have become leading contenders for providing micro-mobility support to mobile nodes (MNs). The presence of mobility agents (MAs) in these networks can lead to constrained routing and create areas of bottleneck around the MAs. When an MA is integrated in the access network all traffic is forced to flow through that MA potentially over-utilising paths along the MA, whereas other paths of the network remain under-utilised. For the efficient deployment of such networks, optimal and robust MA selection and load balancing mechanisms are required. This study introduces proactive autonomic load uniformisation, a self-managed load balancing scheme in which the congestion caused by MAs is reduced leading to better utilisation of the network resources. Assuming that the network supports multiple MAs, the proposed solution selects the optimal MAs by distributing optimally the incoming load within the network while at the same time maintaining the quality of service requirements for the MNs. The results show that the congestion is lowered by 25% within the network and the load is distributed uniformly across the MAs.