Mobility Agent Session Recovery via Distributed Backup
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Solution Overview
Problem
Mobile IP networks face challenges in efficiently recovering mobility agent sessions due to loss of mobility bindings when agents restart or fail, leading to system delays and resource inefficiencies.
Innovation Solution
Implementing a mechanism for mobility agents to distributively back up and recover mobility agent-specific information among peers, using recovery messages with reliability features such as sequence numbers and acknowledgments, to reconstruct mobility agent states without relying on high availability schemes.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Reliability
If mobility agents use traditional restart mechanisms, then system simplicity is maintained, but mobility bindings are lost causing service interruption
Solution Approach 1:
The patent implements preliminary action by having mobility agents proactively distribute and store copies of mobility binding information to peer agents before any failure occurs. When a mobility agent restarts, it can immediately recover its state by retrieving stored information from peers without waiting for re-registration, thus maintaining session continuity while using a relatively simple recovery mechanism.
Solution Approach 2:
The patent applies copying by creating redundant copies of mobility binding information across multiple peer mobility agents. Each agent maintains copies of bindings for other agents' mobile nodes, enabling any agent to recover its state from peers. This copying approach ensures reliability through redundancy while keeping individual agent storage requirements manageable.
2Productivity
If mobility agents distribute backup information among peers, then recovery efficiency is improved, but network message overhead increases
Solution Approach 1:
The patent merges the distribution of mobility binding information with the existing Mobile IP registration message flow. Recovery information is piggybacked on registration requests and replies that already traverse the network, eliminating the need for separate dedicated recovery messages. This approach improves recovery speed by ensuring information is already available while minimizing additional network overhead by utilizing existing communication channels.
3Reliability
If mobility agents store complete binding information locally, then recovery reliability is improved, but memory resource consumption increases
Solution Approach 1:
The patent segments the storage responsibility for mobility binding information across multiple peer mobility agents rather than requiring each agent to store complete information independently. Each agent stores binding information for other agents' mobile nodes, creating a distributed segmentation of the overall binding database. This segmentation approach ensures high recovery reliability through redundancy while keeping individual agent memory consumption proportional to the number of foreign agents rather than total mobile nodes.
Data Source
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AI summary
Techniques for recovering Mobile Internet Protocol (IP) session(s) of a mobility agent in a Mobile IP network are described herein. In one embodiment of the invention, for each mobility session associated with a mobility agent, the mobility agent distributively backs up mobility agent specific information to the mobility agent peer associated with that mobility session. The mobility agent specific information is not used by the mobility agent peer. Upon the mobility agent inadvertently losing at least one mobility session, the mobility agent recovers the stored mobility agent specific information associated with those sessions from the mobility agent peers respectively associated with those sessions. Other methods and apparatuses are also described.