A Local Mobility Agent Selection Algorithm for Mobile Networks

The Mobile IP protocol has been designed to address the problem of roaming between IP networks. However, as a mobile node moves between networks, the signaling overhead causes significant disruption to real time data traffic. The Localized Mobility Management (LMM) has been proposed to enhance the handoff performance between networks within the same domain. By introducing the concept of Local Mobility Agent (LMA), a mobile node visiting a foreign domain is exempted from sending frequent address update to its home agent and correspondent nodes, when its movement is limited to the visited domain. As multiple LMAs are configured in a domain for redundancy, scalability and load sharing concerns, LMA selection becomes an issue. This paper proposes a new LMA selection algorithm, Mobile Controlled Movement Tracking (MCMT). The objective of this new algorithm is to discover the optimal LMA in terms of selection stability and load balancing, by taking into consideration the mobility characteristics of the mobile node. Our analysis shows that this proposal can provide good support for low latency handoff and load sharing among LMAs