Dynamic management of multiple mobile routers

Network mobility (NEMO) support is used to maintain the Internet connectivity of a group of terminals located into a network that changes its point of attachment to the Internet. The Internet access is made through a number of interfaces on a mobile router acting as a gateway of the mobile network. The overall bandwidth can be increased and redundancy can be provided by serving the mobile network through multiple mobile routers. However, this raises a number of issues related to multihoming. We therefore propose a multiple mobile router management (MMRM) system which allows nodes in the mobile network to be connected transparently to the Internet through multiple mobile routers. Mobile routers can dynamically join and leave the mobile network. They cooperate in order to share their Internet access within the entire mobile network. The proposed system is implemented and evaluated. Evaluation results show that the overhead of our system is negligible while redundancy and the overall bandwidth for the nodes in the mobile network are increased.