Efficient mobility support by indirect mapping in networks with locator/identifier separation

In networks with locator/identifier separation, it is of critical importance to design an elegant mapping service to map identifiers onto locators. While there are many mapping services in the literature, how to support efficient host mobility is still an open issue. In this paper, we first borrow the idea of indirection from proxy mobile IPv6 and incorporate it into the design of a mapping service. In particular, we divide the network into many rendezvous domains (RDs) and assign a rendezvous point (RP) to a mobile node (MN) when it moves into an RD. In addition, the mapping registered into a mapping system for the MN is the mapping from the MN's identifier onto the RP's locator. When other nodes send packets to the MN, these packets are first sent to the MN's RP, which then sends packets to the attaching egress tunnel router. This way, the identifier-to-locator mapping for the MN remains unchanged as long as it roams within the same RD, thus supporting efficient host mobility. We then propose a method to build large RDs and handover processes to deal with host mobility. We also present numerical results to demonstrate the performance of the proposed approaches.