Design of scalable QoS guaranteed mobile IPv6 communication scheme using MPLS

Recently, the QoS guarantee is required to realize various mobile real time communications. So far, there are some studies focusing on QoS Mobile IP communication, but they require backbone routers to maintain per-flow QoS information for all individual Mobile Nodes. Therefore, these approaches suffer from the scalability problem at backbone routers. Against them, we have adopted a hierarchical method using MPLS to solve this problem in Mobile IPv6 environment. In this paper, we introduce Virtual Foreign Agent (VFA) in the foreign network of MN to manage the QoS communication paths, and develop an approach in which the per-flow QoS information is maintained only by HA, VFAs and CNs. MPLS paths with large bandwidth are introduced between VFAs and CNs, over which a per-flow path with small bandwidth called Pathlet is established for individual communication between MNs and CNs. The maintenance of Pathlets is only performed by VFAs and CNs, and backbone MPLS routers take care of only MPLS paths with large bandwidth. This paper describes the detailed procedure of QoS communication between MNs and Fixed Hosts by applying our scheme. With our new scheme, an MN can be provided QoS communication directly with Fixed Hosts without the triangle routing, the overhead of Return Routability Procedure, nor the latency of reserving QoS Path hop-by-hop.