Design and Evaluation of DNS as Location Manager for HIP

Host Identity Protocol (HIP) is designed to provide secure and continuous communication by separating the identifier and locator roles of the Internet Protocol (IP) address. HIP also has efficient solutions to support host mobility. In this paper, we propose a location management scheme based on Domain Name System (DNS) for HIP. In the proposed scheme, a new DNS HIP resource record is used to translate a domain name into a host identity tag and an IP address. We also develop an analytical model to study the performance of DNS as location manager in terms of success rate, which takes into account the velocity of mobile nodes, the radius of a subnet, the regional network size, the packet transmission delay between the mobile node and the rendezvous server, and the packet processing delay at the DNS and the rendezvous server. The performance results show that for a reasonable range, the DNS is a feasible solution for location management with high success rate for HIP.