A Revised Mapping System Design for Host Identity Procotol

Abstract

Legacy mapping system for HIP (Host Identity Protocol) is designed based on the traditional DNS (Domain Name System). In addition HIP introduces a new RVS (Rendezvous Server) to maintain the location information for mobile hosts and forward I1 packets to mobile responders. However this design has at least two defects. The first one is that a fixed host may not be approachable for a fairly long period of time if it changes its IP address, because of the existence of deprecated cached entries in DNS. The other is that the load of RVS will be aggravated if a mobile responder is not active or not approachable, because the I1 packets whose destination are mobile responders are forwarded through RVS and will be retransmitted several times. To overcome these defects, in this paper we propose a revised mapping system design for HIP by introducing a new entity called MS (Mapping Server) to store the mappings from HIT to IP address for HIP hosts. In the new mapping system, RVS is not needed any more, and DNS keeps only the mappings from FQDN to HIT for all HIP hosts. With this design, the information stored in DNS is very stable and does not need to be updated frequently, so the TTL of cached entries can be set much longer thus to promote the lookup performance of DNS.