Analysis of IPv6 Neighbor Discovery for Mobile and Wireless Networks

Abstract: The majority of the current 3GPP and M2M networks use or will use IPv6 for accessing the internet. These IPv6 networks use Neighbor Discovery as defined in RFC 4861 to identify their neighbors on the link and see if they are active. The increase in the complexity of wireless networks and introduction of battery operated devices sets forth notable challenges to certain assumptions in the RFC 4861. The RFC 4861 is more suited for wired networks and its implementation in wireless networks makes it more inefficient. This thesis work focuses on the energy efficient implementation of RFC 4861 using the protocols mentioned in draft-chakrabarti-nordmark-6man-efficient-nd-06. The draft suggests a method of registering all the nodes in the network to their default router, so that the router takes care of all the basic neighbor discovery functionalities without disturbing the battery operated devices which are in sleepy mode. Alongside the legacy Neighbor Discovery, the optimizations proposed by the draft are implemented, on a RADVD based router and an Ubuntu host, to reduce redundant multicast signaling in mobile networks. These optimizations are theoretically analyzed to check if the draft is beneficial for the scalability and transient nature of the wireless networks.