Forwarding performance improvement of a mobile IP home agent

In Mobile IP networks, the home agent manages the destination information of all mobile terminals. It receives as proxy the packets destined for the mobile terminal and transfers them to the now location of the terminal. When the number of terminals in the network is increased, the home agent must manage a large amount of information, which increases the retrieval processing load in packet transfer. It is possible that a packet may be lost by an overloaded home agent. This paper proposes a method of eliminating the retrieval processing of the home agent in packet transfer by utilizing ARP, and of reducing the load of the whole packet transfer process. It is shown experimentally that even if sufficient mobile terminal entries to completely fill the location information list for 200,000 entries are registered, the home agent can transfer all packets without any packet loss in Fast Ethernet. (C) 2006 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.