Home Agent Control Plane Segmentation for Proxy Load Reduction
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Solution Overview
Problem
The load on proxy servers or gateways in existing mobility management systems is heavy due to their involvement in both control signaling and data packet forwarding during network mobility, leading to performance issues.
Innovation Solution
The system separates the home agent into a control plane (HA-C) and a user plane (HA-U), where HA-C handles control signaling and HA-U performs tunnel communication, reducing the load on original proxy servers or gateways by offloading control signaling interactions to a newly-added proxy server, while HA-U handles tunnel communication.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Reliability
If the home agent is deployed on a proxy server or gateway to handle both control signaling and data packet forwarding, then mobility management functionality is provided, but the load on the proxy server or gateway becomes heavy
Solution Approach 1:
The home agent functionality is segmented into two separate entities: a control plane home agent (HA-C) deployed on a proxy server to handle control signaling, and a user plane home agent (HA-U) deployed on the gateway to handle data packet forwarding. This segmentation resolves the contradiction by distributing the workload, allowing the proxy server to focus on control functions while the gateway handles data traffic, thereby reducing the load on the proxy server while maintaining complete mobility management functionality.
2Device complexity
If control plane and user plane are combined in a single home agent deployment, then system complexity is reduced, but the load on the proxy server increases
Solution Approach 1:
The system separates control plane and user plane functions into distinct home agent entities (HA-C and HA-U) deployed on different infrastructure components. While this increases architectural complexity, it significantly reduces the operational load on the proxy server by offloading data plane processing to the gateway, thereby resolving the contradiction between system complexity and server load.
Solution Approach 2:
The HA-C acts as an intermediary that coordinates between the mobile node and the HA-U for data plane operations. This mediator approach allows control signaling to be handled centrally while data forwarding is distributed to the gateway, reducing proxy server load while maintaining coordinated system operation.
3Reliability
If the home agent handles both control signaling and tunnel communication, then functionality is complete, but bandwidth consumption increases
Solution Approach 1:
By segmenting the home agent into HA-C (control plane) and HA-U (user plane), the patent enables optimized bandwidth usage. The HA-C handles control signaling with minimal bandwidth consumption, while the HA-U on the gateway handles data plane traffic locally, reducing the need for extensive tunneling overhead and thereby reducing overall bandwidth consumption while maintaining complete functionality.
Data Source
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AI summary
Embodiments of the present invention provide a mobility management method, apparatus, and system. An HA-C sends a first BA message to an MN, where the first BA message includes an address of a first HA-U, so that the MN performs tunnel communication with the first HA-U according to the first BA message; and the HA-C sends a configuration message to the first HA-U, where the configuration message includes an HoA and a CoA that are of the MN, so that the first HA-U performs tunnel communication with the MN according to the configuration message. In this way, an original proxy server or an original gateway completes only tunnel communication with the MN, and a newly-added proxy server completes control signaling interaction with a BU, thereby reducing load of the original proxy server or the original gateway, and resolving a prior-art problem that load of a proxy server or a gateway is relatively heavy.