Estimation of a Mobile IPv6’s home agent load

Abstract

The Home Agent (HA) is a key point when considering the performance of Mobile IPv6-based networks. This paper presents the first steps towards characterizing the load of a HA. This may be useful both for researchers that aim to propose novel architectures that improve the performance of the HAs and for ISPs willing to deploy Mobile IPv6. To achieve our goals first we analyzed the internal traffic of a medium-size department. Then we reviewed the existing models and we evaluated their applicability to this particular scenario. Our results showed that the estimated load of a HA serving a medium-size department (around 1500 hosts) is high with a maximum throughput of 262 Mbps.