Load Balance for Distributed Home Agents in Mobile IPv6 draft-deng-mip6-ha-loadbalance-02.txt Hui Deng Hitachi (China) Brian HaleyHewlett-Packard Company Xiaodong Duan China Mobile Rong ZhangChina Telecom Kai ZhangTsinghua Univ.

Reasons There are many reasons a home agent might want to reduce the number of mobile nodes it is currently supporting. For example, it might be overloaded, it wants to achieve better load-balancing between a peer home agent, or it is going offline for service.

Motivation - 1 When the home agent is supporting a large number of mobile nodes and actively tunneling traffic to them, it could become overloaded, leading to dropped packets and connections.

Motivation - 2 Dynamic Home Agent Address Discovery (DHAAD) can be used to find another home agent, but the mobile node has no way of knowing that it should attempt this method until it has problems contacting its current home agent.

Effects This protocol defines a load balance mechanism among multiple home agents which can effectively release and prevent the formation of traffic bottleneck at the home agent.

Proposal We extend the Home Agents List to support load balance information so it can share registration information among the home agents in the home netowrk to make decisions for home agent reassignment. New Load Balance Information Option | Type | Length | Reserved | | Available Mobile Node Number |

Home Agent Handoff message home agent to signal the mobile node it should use another home agent for subsequent Binding Updates | Reserved | | | + + | | + Home Agent Address + | | + + | |

Security Consideration Visited Network | Home Network | | | | AAA | | | HA1 | | | | | | | | | | MN | | BCF | | HA2 | | | | |... | | | | | | HAn | |

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