An active anycast approach to improve roaming mobile IPv6 client performance in multi-server environment

Mobile IPv6 enables mobile clients to retain its network connections while roaming into foreign networks. However, in a multi-server environment whereby multiple mirror servers are located at different IP networks providing the same service, a mobile client consuming a service from a particular server continues consuming the service from the same server after roaming into foreign network, ignoring the existence of other mirror servers that may give higher throughput based on mobile client's latest network location. In this paper, we propose an active anycast-based server selection model that enables roaming mobile client to detect and access a mirror server that gives better performance based on the mobile client's latest network location. Two schemes are proposed for such performance enhancement, namely: Best Performance Scheme (BPS), and Acceptable Performance Scheme (APS). In BPS, mobile client re-initiates the server selection process whenever it roams into a foreign network. In APS, mobile client re-initiates the server selection process only if the throughput of the current server drops to a dissatisfactory level. Simulation is performed to evaluate the proposed schemes and its results are presented and discussed