Mobility multihoming duality for the Internet Protocol

Abstract

In the current Internet, mobile devices with multiple connectivity are becoming increasingly common; however, the Internet protocol itself has not evolved accordingly. Instead, add-on mechanisms have emerged, but they do not integrate well. Currently, the user suffers from disruption to communication on the end-host as the physical network connectivity changes. This is because the IP address changes when the point of attachment changes, breaking the transport layer end-to-end state. Furthermore, while a device can be connected to multiple networks simultaneously, the use of IP addresses prevents end-hosts from leveraging multiple network interfaces — a feature known as host multihoming, which can potentially improve the throughput or reliability. While solutions exist separately for mobility and multihoming, it is not possible to use them as a duality solution for the end-host. This work extended ILNPv6, an engineering solution of Identifier-Locator Network Protocol (ILNP) implemented as a superset of IPv6 on the Linux kernel. The existing implementation was extended to enable mobility and multihoming duality. First, the mobility implementation was enhanced to support continuous mobility; a comparative analysis against Mobile IPv6 (MIPv6) showed superior performance during a series of handoffs. Second, multihoming was implemented and integrated with mobility; the evaluation with a flexible multi-connectivity scenario with load-balancing showed negligible loss and consistent throughput. Finally, the impact of the combined mobility-multihoming mechanism was evaluated with a real-time video streaming application showing continuous uninterrupted real-time video playback up to 2160p (4K ultra high definition). Overall, this work has demonstrated that mobility-multihoming duality is possible for end-hosts over IPv6 for existing applications without changing the network infrastructure.