Wireless technologies are rapidly evolving and the users are demanding the possibility of changing its point of attachment to the Internet (i.e. default router) without breaking the IP communications. This can be achieved by using Mobile IP or NEMO, however mobile clients must forward its data packets through its Home Agent (HA) in order to communicate with its peers. This sub-optimal route (lack of route optimization) reduces considerably the communications performance, increases the delay and the infrastructure load. Additionally, since the HA must forward all the mobile clients’ data packets, it can become the bottleneck of such networks. In this paper we present the fP2P-HN architecture, a P2P-based solution that allows deploying several HAes throughout the Internet. With this architecture a mobile client can select a closer HA to its topological position in order to reduce the delay of the paths towards its peers. Furthermore it incorporates flexible HAes that, as we will see, reduce the load at these entities. The main challenge of our solution is signaling the location of the HAes in Internet. We provide an analytical model that evaluates the costs and the benefits of the fP2P-HN architecture. The model shows that the signaling grows logarithmically with the number of HAes and that the reduction is, at least, 20% (lower bound).

Peer Reviewed