Cisco Systems 78-11741-02 manual Home Agent Redundancy, Storing SAs on AAA, Hsrp Groups, IPC-165

Configuring Mobile IP

How Mobile IP Works

Storing SAs on AAA

A AAA server can store a large number of SAs and scale well for future SA storage. It can accommodate not only the SAs for MN-HA authorization, but SAs for authorization between other Mobile IP components as well. Storing all SAs in a centralized location can streamline administrative and maintenance tasks related to the SAs.

Caching SAs on HA

When an MN is registering with an HA, keys are needed for the MN-HA authorization process, which requires AAA authorization for Mobile IP. If SAs are stored on a AAA server, the HA must retrieve the appropriate SA from the server. The SA is downloaded to the HA, and the HA caches the SA and reuses it when necessary rather than retrieving it from the AAA server again.

Home Agent Redundancy

During the Mobile IP registration process, an HA creates a mobility binding table that maps the home IP address of an MN to the current care-of address of the MN. If the HA fails, the mobility binding table will be lost and all MNs registered with the HA will lose their connectivity. To reduce the impact of an HA failure, Cisco IOS software supports the HA redundancy feature.

The functionality of HA redundancy runs on top of the Hot Standby Router Protocol (HSRP). HSRP is a protocol developed by Cisco that provides network redundancy in a way that ensures that user traffic will immediately and transparently recover from failures.

HSRP Groups

Before configuring HA redundancy, you must understand the concept of HSRP groups.

An HSRP group is composed of two or more routers that share an IP address and a MAC (Layer 2) address and act as a single virtual router. For example, your Mobile IP topology can include one active HA and one or more standby HAs that the rest of the topology view as a single virtual HA.

You must define certain HSRP group attributes on the interfaces of the HAs so that Mobile IP can implement the redundancy. You can use the groups to provide redundancy for MNs with a home link on either the interface of the group (a physical network) or on virtual networks. Virtual networks are logical circuits that are programmed and share a common physical infrastructure.

How HA Redundancy Works

The HA redundancy feature enables you to configure an active HA and one or more standby HAs.

HA functionality is a service provided by the router and is not interface specific. Therefore, the HA and the MN must agree on which HA interface the MN should send its registration requests, and conversely, on which HA interface the HA should receive the registration requests. This agreement must factor in the following two scenarios:

•An MN that has an HA interface (HA IP address) that is not on the same subnet as the MN

•An MN that requires the HA interface to be on the same subnet as the MN, that is, the HA and the MN must be on the same home network

For MNs on physical networks, an active HA accepts registration requests from the MN and sends binding updates to the standby HA. This process keeps the mobility binding table on the active and standby HAs synchronized. See (a) in Figure 29 for an example of this process.

Cisco IOS IP Configuration Guide

IPC-165