Development of Proxy Mobile IPv6 using Flat Domain Model test-bed

Abstract

Proxy Mobile IPv6 (PMIPv6) has been developed by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) as a network-based mobility management protocol. The development is aimed to guarantee and support mobility for IP devices or Mobile Node (MN) without the MN involving in any IP layer mobility related to signaling. Using global mobility protocol, managing localized mobility has many problems, therefore PMIPv6 is proposed. Although there are many related research on this PMIPv6 area, most of the research focus only on routing, handover and traffic handling, very few were on test-bed development. Several research works on test-bed development presented are different based on kernel version, software used, platform, to name a few. This paper will illustrate the setting up of the PMIPv6 test-bed for experimental use. In addition, this paper also describes the functions of PMIPv6 entities.

Full text

Development of Proxy Mobile IPv6 Using Flat
Domain Model Test-Bed
Nur Haliza Abdul Wahab, Liza Abdul Latiff
UTM Razak School, UTM Kuala Lumpur , Jalan Semarak,
Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia
nurhaliza197@gmail.com
Sharifah H. S. Ariffin, Norsheila Fisal
UTM MIMOS Center of Excellence, Universiti Teknologi
Malaysia, Skudai
Johor, Malaysia
Abstract— Proxy Mobile IPv6 (PMIPv6) has been developed by
the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) as a network-based
mobility management protocol. The development is aimed to
guarantee and support mobility for IP devices or Mobile Node
(MN) without the MN involving in any IP layer mobility related
to signaling. Using global mobility protocol, managing localized
mobility has many problems, therefore PMIPv6 is proposed.
Although there are many related research on this PMIPv6 area,
most of the research focus only on routing, handover and traffic
handling, very few were on test-bed development. Several
research works on test-bed development presented are different
based on kernel version, software used, platform, to name a few.
This paper will illustrate the setting up of the PMIPv6 test-bed
for experimental use. In addition, this paper also describes the
functions of PMIPv6 entities.
Index Terms— Proxy Mobile IPv6 (PMIPv6), Local Mobility
Anchor (LMA), Mobile Access Gateway (MAG).
I. INTRODUCTION
Mobile IPv6 (MIPv6) was designed by IETF to support the
IPv6 mobility. This MIPv6 protocol was developed to maintain
IP connectivity for Mobile Node . MIPv6 provides MN with a
permanent address set by the Home Agent (HA) which acts as
an identifier and a temporary Care-of-Address (CoA) used as a
locator. Figure 1 shows mobile IP routing flow.
Although MIPv6 enable a MN to move but this ability is
still not sufficient for true mobility. Enabling efficient
handover is an additional and critical requirement thus IETF
introduces the Proxy Mobile IPv6 (PMIPv6). The main
difference between PMIPv6 and MIPv6 is that MIPv6 is a
„host-based‟ approach while PMIPv6 is a „network-based‟
approach. Network-based mobility means that MN does not
participate in the exchange of signaling messages to process the
mobility.
There are three main advantages [1, 2] of PMIPv6 and they
are:-
 Handover performance optimization.
PMIPv6 can reduce latency in IP handovers by
limiting the mobility management within the
PMIPv6 domain. Therefore, it can largely avoid
remote service which not only cause long service
delays but consume more network resources.
 Reduction in handover-related signaling overhead.
The handover-related signaling overhead can be
reduced in PMIPv6 since it avoids tunneling
overhead over the air as well as the remote
Binding Updates either to the HA or to the
Correspondent Node (CN).
 Location privacy.
Keeping the mobile node‟s Home Address (MN-
HoA) unchanged over the PMIPv6 domain
dramatically reduces the chance that the attacker
can deduce the precise location of the mobile
node.
Fig.1: Mobile IP routing
There are two main entities in PMIPv6. Local Mobility
Anchor (LMA) and Mobile Access Gateway (MAG). The
function of LMA is to act as the topological anchor point for
MN prefix assignments. LMA routes point to MAGs which
manages the links to maintain the state of MN. LMA is
responsible to detect MN movements and change of
attachment. Packets sent to and received from MN are routed
via tunnels between LMA and the corresponding MAG.
Table I shows the comparison between MIPv6 and PMIPv6
based on several protocol criteria while Figure 2 shows the
relation of LMA and MAG.
MAG performs the mobility-related signaling on behalf of
MN which is attached to it. MAG acts as an Access Router for
MN, which is the first-hop router in the Localized Mobility
Management (LMM). Figure 2 shows the signaling information
- 1088 -

transverse when a Mobile Node connects to the PMIPv6
network.
TABLE I: DIFFERENCES BETWEEN MIPV6 AND PMIPV6
Protocol Criteria
MIPv6
PMIPv6
Mobility Scope
Global
Local
Location Management
Yes
Yes
Required Infrastructure
Home
Agent
Local Mobility Anchor
(LMA),
Mobile Access Gateway
(MAG)
MN Modification
Yes
No
Handover Latency
Bad
Good
Fig. 2: Signaling When Mobile Node Connects to PMIPv6 Network.
The remainder of this paper is organized as follows: Section
II will discuss related research work done in this field.;
Section III will describe the setup of the test-bed; Section IV
will present the results; and lastly Section V will conclude the
paper.
II. RELATED RESEARCH
Over the past few years, there has been a huge interest in
PMIPv6 research area after it was proposed to overcome the
long registration delay problem. Also, with PMIPv6 tunneling
overhead over the air can be reduced and support the hosts
without any involvement in the mobility management.
[3] discuss the recent localized mobility proposal and
explore three major benefits of PMIPv6. A simple
mathematical model for Fast Handovers for MIPv6 as in [3] is
used to evaluate two aspects of handover performance. [3] also
suggested some enhancements for PMIPv6 to further reduce
handover latency.
Thesis in [4] presented a network controlled IP-level
mobility protocol called Simultaneous Binding Proxy Mobile
IPv6 (SPMIPv6), based on the existing Proxy Mobile IPv6
protocol. In this thesis, the SPMIPv6 protocol was
implemented in test-bed.
[5] is the RFC5213 for PMIPv6. The contents in [5] are
about the introduction and discussion on PMIPv6. The
movement from MIPv6 to PMIPv6 also discussed in [5].
III. SETUP
Proxy Mobile IPv6 is the only network-based mobility
management protocol standardized by IETF. There are two
models deployed for PMIPv6 and they are Flat Domain Model
and Domain Chaining. Table II shows the difference in
architecture between Flat Domain Model and Domain
Chaining.
A. General Overview
In this PMIPv6 test-bed project, the model used is Flat
Domain Model. The architecture for this work is shown in
Figure 3. From Figure 3, PMIPv6 architecture has several
entities, which consist of LMA, MAG, (Cellular Network) CN
and MN.
As mentioned before, the function of LMA is to maintain a
collection of host route and their associated mobility
management domain under its control while MAG is a
functional network element that terminates a specific edge link
and tracks mobile node IP-layer mobility between edge links.
- 1089 -

TABLE II :Architecture For Flat Domain And Domain
Chaining
The key properties for PMIPv6 technology proposed is that
no client software is required, therefore CN and MN is a single
device without any settings needed to be changed in them. The
CN and MN can be either an IPv4 client, IPv6 client or a dual
stack client but in this project, the CN and MN is a dual stack
client which have both IPv4 and IPv6 addresses.
Fig. 3: Proxy Mobile IPv6 Architecture.
B. Software and Hardware Requirement
The general software requirement to build up the PMIPv6
test-bed is Linux Open Source (OS). The Linux version is
Ubuntu 10.04 LTS. All the system from LMA, MAG1,
MAG2, CN and MN use this OS. The kernel used is
2.6.32.59+drm33.24.
The software to build up PMIPv6 is open air interface‟s
(OAI) software and the version is 0.4.1 [8]. This software will
be configured and installed into LMA, MAG1 and MAG2
system.
C. Kernel Setup and Installation
As mention previously , kernel version used in this
PMIPv6 test-bed is 2.6.32.15+drm.33.24. The kernel will
enable several features to support PMIPv6 environment . The
kernel features are listed as follows that should be enabled:
 CONFIG_EXPERIMENTAL = y
 CONFIG_SYSVIPC = y
 CONFIG_PROC_FS = y
 CONFIG_NET = y
 CONFIG_INET = y
 CONFIG_IPV6 = y
 CONFIG_IPV6_MIP6 = y
 CONFIG_XFRM = y
 CONFIG_IP_ADVANCED_ROUTER = y
 CONFIG_IPV6_MULTIPLE_TABLES = y
 CONFIG_INET6_XFRM_MODE_ROUTEOPTIMI
ZATION = y
 CONFIG_IPV6_SUBTRESS = y
 CONFIG_ARPD = y
 CONFIG_INET6_ESP = y
 CONFIG_NET_KEY = y
 CONFIG_NET_KEY_MIGRATE = y
 CONFIG_XFRM_USER = y
 CONFIG_XFRM_SUB_POLICY = y
 CONFIG_IPV6_TUNNEL = y
Several packages need to be installed into the devices
(LMA, MAGs). Packages needed for PMIPv6 test-bed are:
 libpcap-dev
 indent
 bison
 flex
 proute-dev
 macchanger
 libc6-dev
 libssl-dev
 autoconf
 libtool
 python-netaddr
D. OAI PMIPv6 Open Sources
The main software used in this PMIPv6 test-bed is OAI
PMIPv6 software version 0.4.1. This software needs several
configurations to be made before it can be used.
Flat Domain Model
Domain Chaining
- 1090 -

 LMA Setup: FreeRadius Server and Client needed to
be installed in the LMA device. This software is a
modified version by OAI from freeradius.org.
 MAG Setup: All MAGs need to run the SYSLOG
Server so MAGs machines needed to be installed
with functions socklog and syslogd packages. MAGs
are also needed to be installed with the FreeRadius
Client.
 Access Point (AP) Setup: AP that connects to the
MAGs needed to be configured to enable their
SYSLOG client.
 MN, CN and Hub: These devices do not require any
configuration or modification.
IV. RESULT
To allow IPv6 addresses to be used in the system, the
kernel setting should enable the IPv6. As mention in previous
section, the kernel 2.6.32 should be setup to meet IPv6
forwarding. Figure 4 shows that the LMA system has been
successfully enabled in the PMIPv6. To see this result, the
LMA need to be run and the script in Figure 4 will be seen.
Fig. 4: Proxy Mobile IPv6 Architecture.
Along with this execution of LMA system, thje screen
capture in Figure 5 will be seen in the LAM‟s terminal.
Fig.5: Proxy Mobile IPv6 Architecture.
The MAGs will all be connected to the LMA to make sure
all settings in the LMA can be forwarded to MAGs and also to
MN and CN. Figure 6 shows the MAG is successfully run as
MAG entities to make sure that all settings to develop the
PMIPv6 test-bed is a success.
Fig. 6: Proxy Mobile IPv6 Architecture.
V. CONCLUSION
The aim of this project is to develop PMIPv6 test-bed for
experimental use. This PMIPv6 test-bed was developed via
open air interface software on top of Linux based system
Ubuntu 10.04 LTS and the kernel used is version 2.6.32. This
PMIPv6 framework consists of three (3) computers which is
the LMA, MAG1 and MAG2, two (2) notebooks which act as
MN and CN and lastly two (2) routers.
This PMIPv6 test-bed was successfully run without errors.
In future, this PMIPv6 test-bed will be used for experimental
testing. In addition, the comparison result between
experimental result via this PMIPv6 test-bed and simulation via
NS3 will be compare.
REFERENCES
[1] Jun Lei, Xiaoming Fu, “Evaluating the Benefits of Introducing
PMIPv6 for Localized Mobility Management”, Wireless
Communications and Mobile Computing Conference, 2008.
IWCMC '08. International, 74 – 80
[2] J. Kempf, K. Leung, P. Roberts, K. Nishida, G. Giaretta, and M.
Liebsch, “Problem Statement for Network-based Localized
Mobility Management,” RFC 4830, IETF, 2007.
[3] Gundavelli, S., Leung, K., Devarapalli, V., Chowdhury, K., and
Patil, B., "Proxy Mobile IPv6", RFC 5213, Aug 2008.
[4] Liebsch, M., "PMIPv6 Localized Routing Problem Statement",
draft-ietf-netext-pmip6-lr-ps-02, Jan 2010.
[5] IETF, “Proxy Mobile IPv6,” RFC 5213, Aug. 2008.
[6] Jin Ho Kim, Rim Haw, Choong Seon Hong, "Development of
PMIPv6 based 6LoWPAN Sensor Node Mobility Scheme”, The
third AsiaFI Winter School, Seoul National University, Seoul,
Korea, ebruary 27, 2010
[7] K. Idserda, “Simultaneous Binding Proxy Mobile IPv6”,
Master‟s Thesis, University of Twente, Enschede, The
Netherlands.
[8] PMIPv6 Open Source, http://www.openairinterface.org
- 1091 -