SEMINAR ON MOBILE INTERNET PROTOCOL

ABSTRACT
Many organizations utilize traditional wire-based networking technologies to
establish connections among computers. These technologies fall into the following
three main categories namely LAN, MAN & WAN.

These traditional networking technologies offer tremendous capabilities from an

office, hotel room, or home. Activities such as communicating via e-mail with
someone located in a faraway town or conveniently accessing product information
from the World Wide Web are the result of widespread networking. But limitations
to networking through the wire-based system exist because you cannot utilize these
network services unless you are physically connected to a LAN or a telephone
system.

Wireless networks are stretching their legs day by day. With the increasing no. of
mobile users wireless technology has become inevitable. Wireless networking is the
first step towards the mobile communication system. As for wireless networking we
use certain protocols for the communication thus definitely we need protocols for
mobile communication. These protocols as in wireless networks are called Mobile
IP or Mobile Internet Protocol.

The day will arrive, hastened by Mobile IP, when no person will ever feel ―lost or
out of touch. As people move from place to place with their laptop, keeping
connected to the network can become a challenging and sometimes frustrating and
expensive proposition. The goal is that with widespread deployment of the mobile
networking technologies described here automatic communications with globally
inter-connected computing resources will be considered as natural for people on the
move as it is for people sitting at a high performance workstation in their office. In
the near future communicating via laptop should be as natural as using telephone.

Although the Internet offers access to information sources worldwide, typically we

do not expect to benefit from that access until we arrive at some familiar point -
whether home, office, or school. However, the increasing variety of wireless devices
offering IP connectivity, such as personal digital assistants, handhelds, and digital
cellular phones, is beginning to change our perceptions of the Internet.
Mobile IP is a proposed standard protocol that builds on the Internet Protocol by
making mobility transparent to applications and higher-level protocols like TCP.
This paper aims at discussing the design principles of Mobile IP and how it can be
incorporated with the already existing Internet architecture.

Mobile Internet Protocol is a new recommended Internet protocol designed to

support the mobility of a user (host). Host mobility is becoming important because
of the recent blossoming of laptop computers and the high desire to have continuous
network connectivity anywhere the host happens to be. The development of Mobile
IP makes this possible.

There are mainly three processes in Mobile IP:

1. Agent Discovery: The process by which a Mobile node determines its current
location and obtains the care of address.
2. Registration: The process by which a Mobile node request service from a foreign
agent on foreign link and informs its home agent of its current care-of address.
3. Tunneling: The specific mechanism by which packets are routed to and from a
Mobile node that is connected to a foreign link.

Mobile Computing is becoming increasingly important due to the rise in the number
of portable computers and the desire to have continuous network connectivity to the
Internet irrespective of the physical location of the node. The Internet infrastructure
is built on top of a collection of protocols, called the TCP/IP protocol suite.
Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) and Internet Protocol (IP) are the core
protocols in this suite. IP requires the location of any host connected to the Internet
to be uniquely identified by an assigned IP address. This raises one of the most
important issues in mobility, because when a host moves to another physical
location, it has to change its IP address. However, the higher level protocols require
IP address of a host to be fixed for identifying connections.

The Mobile Internet Protocol (Mobile IP) is an extension to the Internet Protocol
proposed by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) that addresses this issue.
It enables mobile computers to stay connected to the Internet regardless of their
location and without changing their IP address.

Mobile IP specifies enhancements that allow transparent routing of IP datagrams to

mobile nodes in the Internet. Each mobile node is always identified by its home
address, regardless of its current point of attachment to the Internet. While situated
away from its home, a mobile node is also associated with a care-of address, which
provides information about its current point of attachment to the Internet. The
protocol provides for registering the care-of address with a home agent. The home
agent sends datagrams destined for the mobile node through a tunnel to the care-of
address. After arriving at the end of the tunnel, each datagram is then delivered to
the mobile node.

Regardless of the movement between different networks connectivity at the

different points is achieved easily. Roaming from a wired network to wireless or
wide area network is also done with ease. Mobile IP is a part of both IPV4 and
IPV6.

The description of the core differences between the present protocol Ipv4 and the
future protocol Ipv6 such as scalability, security, realtimeness, Plug and Play, Clear
spec. and optimizations are looked. Covered next is the difference between the
headers schemes of the IPV4 the currently used Protocol Vs IPV6 the up-coming
sensation in the Internet World. Well you are using it then you should be aware of
what are the advantages of the thing and thus here it covers the Advantages of IPV6
over IPV4.
 INDEX

TOPIC PAGE NO

1. INTRODUCTION
2. MOBILE IP OVERVIEW

3. TERMINOLOGY

4. PROTOCOL OVERVIEW

5. RELATIONSHIPS OF THE COMPONENTS

6. HOW MOBILE IP WORKS

1. AGENT DISCOVERY
2. REGISTRATION
3. TUNNELING
4. SECURITY

7. ONGOING WORK & OPEN QUESTIONS

8. CHANGES WITH IPV6

1. ROUTE OPTIMIZATION
2. SECURITY
3. SOURCE ROUTING

11. IMPROVING THE PERFORMANCE OF HAND OFF

IN MOBILE IP
12. CONCLUSION
13. REFERENCES AND BIBLIOGRAPHY
INTRODUCTION

The exponential growth of the Internet and the inexorable increase in native
computing power of laptop computers and other digital wireless data
communication devices has brought the need for mobile networking into sharp
focus. As network services proliferate and become available ubiquitously, every
network device will take advantage of mobile networking technology to offer
maximum flexibility to the customers needing those devices.

To understand the contrast between the current realities of IP connectivity and future
possibilities, consider the transition toward mobility that has occurred in telephony
over the past 20 years. An analogous transition in the domain of networking, from
dependence on fixed points of attachment to the flexibility afforded by mobility, has
just begun.

As PDAs and the next generation of data-ready cellular phones become more
widely deployed, a greater degree of connectivity is almost becoming a necessity
for the business user on the go. Data connectivity solutions for this group of users
are a very different requirement than it is for the fixed dialup user or the stationary
wired LAN user. Solutions here need to deal with the challenge of movement during
a data session or conversation. Cellular service providers and network
administrators wanting to deploy wireless LAN technologies need to have a solution
which will grant this greater freedom.

Cisco IOS has integrated new technology into our routing platforms to meet these
new networking challenges. Mobile IP is a tunneling-based solution which takes
advantage of the Cisco-created GRE tunneling technology, as well as simpler IP-
in-IP tunneling protocol. This tunneling enables a router on a user’s home subnet to
intercept and transparently forward IP packets to users while they roam beyond
traditional network boundaries. This solution is a key enabler of wireless mobility,
both in the wireless LAN arena, such as the 802.11 standard, and in the cellular
environment for packet-based data offerings which offer connectivity to a user’s
home network and the Internet.

Mobile IP provides users the freedom to roam beyond their home subnet while
consistently maintaining their home IP address. This enables transparent routing of
IP data grams to mobile users during their movement, so that data sessions can be
initiated to them while they roam; it also enables sessions to be maintained in spite
of physical movement between points of attachment to the Internet or other
networks. Cisco’s implementation of Mobile IP is fully compliant with the Internet
Engineering Task Force’s (IETF’s) proposed standard defined in Request for
Comments.

Mobile computing and networking should not be confused with the portable
computing and networking we have today. In mobile networking, computing
activities are not disrupted when the user changes the computer's point of
attachment to the Internet. Instead, all the needed reconnection occurs automatically
and non-interactively.

Truly mobile computing offers many advantages. Confident access to the Internet
anytime, anywhere will help free us from the ties that bind us to our desktops.
Consider how cellular phones have given people new freedom in carrying out their
work. Taking along an entire computing environment has the potential not just to
extend that flexibility but to fundamentally change the existing work ethic.

The evolution of mobile networking will differ from that of telephony in some
important respects. The endpoints of a telephone connection are typically human;
computer applications are likely to involve interactions between machines without
human intervention. Obvious examples of this are mobile computing devices on
airplanes, ships, and automobiles. Mobile networking may well also come to depend
on position-finding devices, such as a satellite global positioning system, to work in
tandem with wireless access to the Internet.

However, there are still some technical obstacles that must be overcome before
mobile networking can become widespread. The most fundamental is the way the
Internet Protocol, the protocol that connects the networks of today's Internet, routes
packets to their destinations according to IP addresses. These addresses are
associated with a fixed network location much as a non-mobile phone number is
associated with a physical jack in a wall. When the packet's destination is a mobile
node, this means that each new point of attachment made by the node is associated
with a new network number and, hence, a new IP address, making transparent
mobility impossible.
Network mobility is enabled by Mobile IP, which provides a scalable, transparent,
and secure solution. It is scalable because only the participating components need
to be Mobile IP aware—the Mobile Node and the endpoints of the tunnel. No other
routers in the network or any hosts with which the Mobile Node is communicating
need to be changed or even aware of the movement of the Mobile Node. It is
transparent to any applications while providing mobility. Also, the network layer
provides link-layer independence; interlink layer roaming, and link-layer
transparency. Finally, it is secure because the setup of packet redirection is
authenticated.

2. Mobile IP Overview

In IP networks, routing is based on stationary IP addresses, similar to how a postal

letter is delivered to the fixed address on the envelope. A device on a network is
reachable through normal IP routing by the IP address it is assigned on the network.

The problem occurs when a device roams away from its home network and is no
longer reachable using normal IP routing. This results in the active sessions of the
device being terminated. Mobile IP was created to enable users to keep the same IP
address while traveling to a different network (which may even be on a different
wireless operator), thus ensuring that a roaming individual could continue
communication without sessions or connections being dropped. Because the
mobility functions of Mobile IP are performed at the network layer rather than the
physical layer, the mobile device can span different types of wireless and wire line
networks while maintaining connections and ongoing applications. Remote login,
remote printing, and file transfers are some examples of applications where it is
undesirable to interrupt communications while an individual roams across network
boundaries. Also, certain network services, such as software licenses and access
privileges, are based on IP addresses. Changing these IP addresses could
compromise the network services.

This section discusses the main concepts and operations of the IETF Mobile IP
protocol. The basic protocol procedures fall into the following areas:
• Advertisement.
• Registration
• Tunneling
Mobile IP is a modification to IP that allows nodes to continue to receive datagrams
no matter where they happen to be attached to the Internet. It involves some
additional control messages that allow the IP nodes involved to manage their IP
routing tables reliably. Scalability has been a dominant design factor during the
development of Mobile IP, because in the future a high percentage of the nodes
attached to the Internet will be capable of mobility.

As explained in the previous section, IP assumes that a node’s network address

uniquely identifies the node’s point of attachment to the Internet. Therefore, a node
must be located on the network indicated by its IP address to receive datagrams
destined to it; otherwise, datagrams destined to the node would be undeliverable.
Without Mobile IP, one of the two following mechanisms must be typically
employed for a node to change its point of attachment without losing the ability to
communicate:

 The node must change its IP address whenever it changes its point of
attachment.
 Host-specific routes must be propagated throughout the relevant portion of
the Internet routing infrastructure.

Both these alternatives are plainly unacceptable in the general case. The first makes
it impossible for a node to maintain transport and higher layer connections when the
node changes location. The second has obvious and severe scaling problems that are
especially relevant considering the explosive growth in sales of notebook (mobile)
computers.

Mobile IP was devised to meet the following goals for mobile nodes that move (that
is, change their point of attachment to the Internet) more frequently than once per
second.

The following five characteristics should be considered baseline requirements to be

satisfied be any candidate for a mobile IP protocol:
1. A mobile node must be able to communicate with other nodes after changing
its link layer point of attachment to the Internet, yet without changing its IP
address.
2. A mobile node must be able to communicate with other nodes that do not
implement Mobile IP.
3. All messages used to transmit information to another node about the location
of a mobile node must be authenticated to protect against remote redirection
attacks.
 4. The link by which a mobile node is directly attached to the Internet may often
be a wireless link. This link may thus have a substantially lower bandwidth
and higher error rate than the traditional wired networks. Moreover, mobile
nodes are likely to be battery powered, and minimizing power consumption is
important. Therefore, the number of administrative messages sent over the
link by which a mobile node is directly connected to the Internet should be
minimized, and the size of these messages should be kept as small as possible.
5. Mobile IP must place no additional constraints on the assignment of IP
addresses.

4. Terminology

3. Terminology

Mobile IP introduces the following new functional entities:

Mobile node – A mobile node is a host or a router that changes its point of
attachment from one network or sub network to another. A mobile node may change
its location without changing its IP address. It may continue to communicate with
other Internet nodes at any location using its (constant) IP address, assuming link-
layer connectivity to a point of attachment is available.

Home agent – A home agent is a router on a mobile node’s home network that
tunnels datagrams for delivery to the mobile node when it is away from home and
maintains current location information for the mobile node.

Foreign agent – A foreign agent is a router on a mobile node’s visited network that
provides routing services to the mobile node while registered. The foreign agent
detunnels and delivers datagrams to the mobile node that were tunneled by the
mobile node’s home agent. The foreign agent may always be selected as a default
router by registered mobile nodes.

A mobile node is given a long term IP address on a home network. When away from
its home network, a care-of address is associated with the mobile node and reflects
the mobile node’s current point of attachment. The mobile node uses its home
address as the source address of all IP datagrams that it sends, except during
registration if it happens to acquire another IP address.

5. Protocol Overview

Mobile IP is, in essence, a way of doing three relatively separate functions:

1. Agent Discovery – Home agents and foreign agents may advertise their
availability on each link for which they provide service. A newly arrived mobile
node can send a solicitation on the link to learn if any prospective agents are present.

2. Registration – When the mobile node is away from home, it registers its care
of address with its home agent. Depending upon its method of attachment, the
mobile node will register either directly with its home agent or through a foreign
agent, which forwards the registration to the home agent.

3. Tunneling – In order for datagrams to be delivered to the mobile node when

it is away from home, the home agent has to tunnel the datagrams to the care-of-
address. When away from home, Mobile IP uses protocol tunneling to hide a mobile
node’s home address from intervening routers between its home network and
current location. The tunnel terminates at the node’s care-of-address. The care-of-
address must be an address to which datagrams can be delivered via conventional
IP routing. At the care-of address, the original datagram is removed from the tunnel
and delivered to the mobile node.

Mobile IP provides two ways to acquire a care-of address:

1. A foreign agent care-of address is a care-of address provided by a foreign

agent through its agent advertisement messages. In this case, the care-of address is
an IP address of the foreign agent. In this mode, the foreign agent is the endpoint of
the tunnel and, on receiving tunneled datagrams, decapsulates them and delivers the
inner datagram to the mobile node. This mode of acquisition is advantageous
because it allows many nodes to share the same care-of address and therefore does
not place unnecessary demands on the already limited Internet Protocol version 4
(Ipv4) address space.

2. A collocated care-of address is a care-of address acquired by the mobile node

as a local IP address through some external means, which the mobile node then
associates with one of its own network interfaces. The address may be dynamically
acquired as a temporary address by the mobile node, such as through DHCP, or it
may be owned by the mobile node as a long-term address for its use only while
visiting some foreign network. When using a collocated care-of address, the mobile
node serves as the end point of the tunnel and performs decapsulation of the
datagrams tunneled to it. An additional advantage of a collocated address for mobile
nodes that are equipped to use the address in this fashion is that they can be used
for connections that are not long lived and thus will never need the services of any
home agent.

With these operations in mind, a rough outline of the operation of the Mobile IP
protocol follows:

1. Mobility agents (that is, foreign agents and home agents) advertise their presence
via agent advertisement messages. A mobile node may optionally solicit an agent
advertisement message from any local mobility agents by using an agent
solicitation message.
2. A mobile node receives an agent advertisement and determines whether it is on
its home network or a foreign network.

3. When the mobile node detects that it is located on its home network, it operates
without mobility services. If returning to its home network from being registered
elsewhere, the mobile node deregisters with its home agent through a variation
of the normal registration process.

4. When the mobile node detects that it has moved to a foreign network, it obtains
a care of address on the foreign network. The care-of address can either be a
foreign agent careof address or a collocated care-of address.

5. The mobile node, operating away from home, then registers its new care-of
address with its home agent through the exchange of a registration request and
registration reply message, possibly by way of a foreign agent.

6. Datagrams sent to the mobile node’s home address are intercepted by its home
agent, tunneled by the home agent to the mobile node’s care-of address, received
at the tunnel endpoint (either at a foreign agent or at the mobile node itself), and
finally delivered to the mobile node.

7. In the reverse direction, datagrams sent by the mobile node may be delivered to
their destination using standard IP routing mechanisms, without necessarily
passing through the home agent.
 Figure 2. Mobile IP datagram flow

Figure 2 illustrates the routing of datagrams to and from a mobile node away from
home, once the mobile node has registered with its home agent. In this figure, the
mobile node is using a foreign agent care-of address as follows:

1. A datagram to the mobile node arrives on the home network via standard IP
routing.

2. The datagram is intercepted by the home agent and is tunneled to the care-of
address.

3. The datagram is detunneled and delivered to the mobile node.

4. For datagrams sent by the mobile node, standard IP routing delivers each
datagram to its destination. In Figure 2, the foreign agent is the mobile node’s
default router.
MESSASGE FORMAT AND PROTCOL EXTENSIBILITY:

To handle registration. Mobile IP defines a set of new control messages sent with
UDP using well-known port number 434. Currently, the following two message
types are defined:
 Registration request
 Registration reply
Up-to-date values for the message types for mobile IP control messages are
specified in the most recent Assigned Numbers.
For agent discovery, Mobile IP modifies the existing router advertisement and
router solicitation messages defined for ICMP router discovery.

Mobile IP defines a general extension mechanism to allow optional information to

be carried by Mobile IP control messages or by ICMP router discovery messages.
Each of these extensions (with one exception, the pad extension) is encoded in what
is conventionally called the type-length-value (TLV) format shown in figure, where
the value is the data following the length.

type length Data(value)

(TLV extension format)

The type indicates the particular type of extension. The length of the extension,
counted in bytes – or, more technically in octets, which are groups of 8 bits – does
not include the type and length bytes, and may be zero or greater. The type and
length fields determine the format of the data field. Extensions allow variable
amounts of information to be carried within each message. The total length of IP
datagram determines the end of the list of extensions.

Two separately maintained sets of numbering spaces, from which extension type
values are allocated, are used in Mobile IP. The first set consists of those extensions
that may appear in Mobile IP control messages (those sent to and from UDP port
number 434). Currently, the following types are defined for extensions appearing in
Mobile IP registration messages:

32 Mobile – home authentication

33 Mobile – foreign authentication
34 Foreign – home authentication

The second set consists of those extensions that may appear in ICMP router
discovery messages. Currently, Mobile IP defines the following types for such
extensions:

0 One byte padding (encoded with no length or data field)

16 Mobility agent advertisements
19 Prefix lengths

Up-to-date values for these extension type numbers are specified in the most recent
list of Assigned Numbers form the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA).

Since these sets of extensions are independent, it is conceivable that two unrelated
extensions that are defined at a later date could have identical type values. One of
the extensions could have identical type values. One of the extensions could be used
only in Mobile IP control messages and the other only in ICMP router discovery
messages.

The value of the extension number is important when trying to determine the
correct disposition of unrecognized extensions. When an extension numbered in
either of these sets within the range 0 through 127 is encountered but not recognized,
the message containing that extension is required to be silently discarded. When an
extension numbered in the range 128 through 255 is encountered but unrecognized,
that particular extension is ignored, but the rest of the extensions and message data
are still required to be processed. The length field of the extension is used to skip
the data field in searching for the next extension.

5. RELATIONSHIP OF THE COMPONENTS OF MOBILE IP

The Mobile Node is a device such as a cell phone, personal digital assistant, or laptop whose
software enables network roaming capabilities.
The Home Agent is a router on the home network serving as the anchor point for
communication with the Mobile Node; it tunnels packets from a device on the Internet,
called a Correspondent Node, to the roaming Mobile Node. (A tunnel is established between
the Home Agent and a reachable point for the Mobile Node in the foreign network.)

The Foreign Agent is a router that may function as the point of attachment for the Mobile
Node when it roams to a foreign network, delivering packets from the Home Agent to the
Mobile Node. The care-of address is the termination point of the tunnel toward the Mobile
Node when it is on a foreign network. The Home Agent maintains an association between
the home IP address of the Mobile Node and its care-of address, which is the current location
of the Mobile Node on the foreign or visited network.

Figure 3. Mobile IP Components and Relationships

6. How Mobile IP Works

6.1 Agent Discovery

During the agent discovery phase, the Home Agent and Foreign Agent advertise
their services on the network by using the ICMP Router Discovery Protocol
(IRDP). The Mobile Node listens to these advertisements to determine if it is
connected to its home network or foreign network.

The IRDP advertisements carry Mobile IP extensions that specify whether an agent
is a Home Agent, Foreign Agent, or both; its care-of address; the types of services
it will provide such as reverse tunneling and generic routing encapsulation (GRE);
and the allowed registration lifetime or roaming period for visiting Mobile Nodes.
Rather than waiting for agent advertisements, a Mobile Node can send out an agent
solicitation. This solicitation forces any agents on the link to immediately send an
agent advertisement. If a Mobile Node determines that it is connected to a foreign
network, it acquires a care-of address.

Two Types of care-of addresses exist:

• Care-of address acquired from a Foreign Agent
• Collocated care-of address

A Foreign Agent care-of address is an IP address of a Foreign Agent that has an

interface on the foreign network being visited by a Mobile Node. A Mobile Node
that acquires this type of care-of address can share the address with other Mobile
Nodes. A colocated care-of address is an IP address temporarily assigned to the
interface of the Mobile Node itself. A collocated care-of address represents the
current position of the Mobile Node on the foreign network and can be used by only
one Mobile Node at a time.

When the Mobile Node hears a Foreign Agent advertisement and detects
that it has moved outside of its home network, it begins registration.
6.2 Registration

The Mobile Node is configured with the IP address and mobility security
association (which includes the shared key) of its Home Agent. In addition, the
Mobile Node is configured with either its home IP address, or another user
identifier, such as a Network Access Identifier.

The Mobile Node uses this information along with the information that it learns
from the Foreign Agent advertisements to form a Mobile IP registration request. It
adds the registration request to its pending list and sends the registration request to
its Home Agent either through the Foreign Agent or directly if it is using a colocated
care-of address and is not required to register through the Foreign Agent. If the
registration request is sent through the Foreign Agent, the Foreign Agent checks the
validity of the registration request, which includes checking that the requested
lifetime does not exceed its limitations, the requested tunnel encapsulation is
available, and that reverse tunnel is supported. If the registration request is valid,
the Foreign Agent adds the visiting Mobile Node to its pending list before relaying
the request to the Home Agent. If the registration request is not valid, the Foreign
Agent sends a registration reply with appropriate error code to the Mobile Node.

The Home Agent checks the validity of the registration request, which includes
authentication of the Mobile Node. If the registration request is valid, the Home
Agent creates a mobility binding (an association of the Mobile Node with its care-
of address), a tunnel to the care-of address, and a routing entry for forwarding
packets to the home address through the tunnel.

The Home Agent then sends a registration reply to the Mobile Node through the
Foreign Agent (if the registration request was received via the Foreign Agent) or
directly to the Mobile Node. If the registration request is not valid, the Home Agent
rejects the request by sending a registration reply with an appropriate error code.

The Foreign Agent checks the validity of the registration reply, including ensuring
that an associated registration request exists in its pending list. If the registration
reply is valid, the Foreign Agent adds the Mobile Node to its visitor list, establishes
a tunnel to the Home Agent, and creates a routing entry for forwarding packets to
the home address. It then relays the registration reply to the Mobile Node.
Finally, the Mobile Node checks the validity of the registration reply, which
includes ensuring an associated request is in its pending list as well as proper
authentication of the Home Agent. If the registration reply is not valid, the Mobile
Node discards the reply. If a valid registration reply specifies that the registration is
accepted, the Mobile Node is confirmed that the mobility agents are aware of its
roaming. In the colocated care-of address case, it adds a tunnel to the Home Agent.
Subsequently, it sends all packets to the Foreign Agent.

The Mobile Node reregisters before its registration lifetime expires. The Home
Agent and Foreign Agent update their mobility binding and visitor entry,
respectively, during registration. In the case where the registration is denied, the
Mobile Node makes the necessary adjustments and attempts to register again.

For example, if the registration is denied because of time mismatch and the Home
Agent sends back its time stamp for synchronization, the Mobile Node adjusts the
time stamp in future registration requests.

Thus, a successful Mobile IP registration sets up the routing mechanism for

transporting packets to and from the Mobile Node as it roams.

6.3 Tunneling

Mobile IP requires the use of encapsulation to deliver datagrams from the home
network to the current location of the mobile node (its care-of address). In the most
general encapsulation (tunneling) case, illustrated in Figure 4. The source,
encapsulator, decapsulator, and destination are separate nodes. The encapsulator
node is considered the entry point of the tunnel, and the decapsulator node is
considered the exit point of the tunnel. Multiple source-destination pairs can use the
same tunnel between the encapsulator and the decapsulator.

Mobile IP requires each agent and foreign agent to support tunneling datagrams
using IP-in-IP encapsulation. Any mobile node that uses a collocated care-of
address is required to support receiving datagrams tunneled using IP-in-IP
encapsulation.

Encapsulation Decapsulation
 Figure 4. General Tunneling

The Mobile Node sends packets using its home IP address, effectively maintaining
the appearance that it is always on its home network. Even while the Mobile Node
is roaming on foreign networks, its movements are transparent to correspondent
nodes. Data packets addressed to the Mobile Node are routed to its home network,
where the Home Agent now intercepts and tunnels them to the care-of address
toward the Mobile Node. Tunneling has two primary functions: encapsulation of the
data packet to reach the tunnel endpoint, and encapsulation when the packet is
delivered at that endpoint. The default tunnel mode is IP Encapsulation within IP
Encapsulation. Optionally, GRE and minimal encapsulation within IP may be used.
Typically, the Mobile Node sends packets to the Foreign Agent, which routes them
to their final destination, the Correspondent Node, as shown in Figure 5.

Figure 5. Packet Forwarding

However, this data path is topologically incorrect because it does not reflect the true
IP network source for the data—rather; it reflects the home network of the Mobile
Node. Because the packets show the home network as their source inside a foreign
network, an access control list on routers in the network called ingress filtering
drops the packets instead of forwarding them. A feature called reverse tunneling
solves this problem by having the Foreign Agent tunnel packets back to the Home
Agent when it receives them from the mobile node see figure 6.

Tunnel MTU (Maximum Transmission Unit) discovery is a mechanism for a tunnel

encapsulator such as the Home Agent to participate in path MTU discovery to avoid
any packet fragmentation in the routing path between a Correspondent Node and
Mobile Node. For packets destined to the Mobile Node, the Home Agent maintains
the MTU of the tunnel to the care-of address and informs the Correspondent Node
of the reduced packet size. This improves routing efficiency by avoiding
fragmentation and reassembly at the tunnel endpoints to ensure that packets reach
the Mobile Node.

7. Security

Mobile IP uses a strong authentication scheme for security purposes. All registration
messages between a Mobile Node and Home Agent are required to contain the
Mobile-Home Authentication Extension (MHAE).

The integrity of the registration messages is protected by a pre-shared 128-bit key

between a Mobile Node and Home Agent. The keyed message digest algorithm 5
(MD5) in ―prefix + suffix‖ mode is used to compute the authenticator value in the
appended MHAE, which is mandatory. Mobile IP also supports the hash-based
message authentication code (HMAC-MD5). The receiver compares the
authenticator value it computes over the message with the value in the extension to
verify the authenticity.

Optionally, the Mobile-Foreign Authentication Extension and Foreign-Home

Authentication Extension are appended to protect message exchanges between a
Mobile Node and Foreign Agent and between a Foreign Agent and Home Agent,
respectively. Replay protection uses the identification field in the registration
messages as a timestamp and sequence number. The Home Agent returns its time
stamp to synchronize the Mobile Node for registration.

Cisco IOS software allows the mobility keys to be stored on an authentication,

authorization, and accounting (AAA) server that can be accessed using TACACS+
or RADIUS protocols. Mobile IP in Cisco IOS software also contains registration
filters, enabling companies to restrict who is allowed to register.

Mobility security association- A collection of security contexts between a pair of

nodes, which may be applied to Mobile IP protocol messages exchanged between
them. Each context indicates an authentication algorithm and mode, a secret (a
shared key or appropriate public/private key pair), and a style of replay protection
in use.

8. ONGOING WORK AND OPEN QUESTIONS

The most pressing outstanding problem facing Mobile IP is that of security, but
other technical as well as practical obstacles to deployment exist. Work is also
continuing to refine and extend the protocol within the academic and commercial
communities and within the IETF. This section surveys the state of implementation
of Mobile IP and speculates on a possible timetable for deployment.

• Routing inefficiencies.

The base Mobile IP specification has the effect of introducing a tunnel into the
routing path followed by packets sent by the correspondent node to the mobile node.
Packets from the mobile node, on the other hand, can go directly to the
correspondent node with no tunneling required. This asymmetry is captured by the
term triangle routing, where a single leg of the triangle goes from the mobile node
to the correspondent node, and the home agent forms the third vertex controlling the
path taken by data from the correspondent node to the mobile node. Triangle routing
is alleviated by use of techniques in the route optimization draft, but doing so
requires changes in the correspondent nodes that will take a long time to deploy for
IPv4. It is hoped that triangle routing will not be a factor for IPv6 mobility.

• Security issues.

A great deal of attention is being focused on making Mobile IP coexist with the
security features coming into use within the Internet. Firewalls in particular, cause
difficulty for Mobile IP because they block all classes of incoming packets that do
not meet specified criteria. Enterprise firewalls are typically configured to block
packets from entering via the Internet that appear to emanate from internal
computers. Although this permits management of internal Internet nodes without
great attention to security, it presents difficulties for mobile nodes wishing to
communicate with other nodes within their home enterprise networks. Such
communications, originating from the mobile node, carry the mobile node's home
address, and would thus be blocked by the firewall.

Mobile IP can be viewed as a protocol for establishing secure tunnels. Gupta and
Glass have proposed a firewall traversal solution. Efforts along these lines are also
being made at BBN as part of the MOIPS (Managed Objects for IP Mobility
Support) project to extend Mobile IP operation across firewalls, even when multiple
security domains are involved.

• Ingress filtering.

Ingress Filtering involves routers dropping packets that do not have a source IP
address consistent with the network address of the network it is being sent from.
This presents a major problem to the operation of Mobile IP. As was described in
above topic, a mobile node attached to a foreign network sends packets using its
home address as the packet source. Hence the packet source will have a different
network prefix to the foreign network address. Routers in the foreign network that
employ ingress filtering will drop this packet.

Complications are also presented by ingress filtering operations. Many border

routers discard packets coming from within the enterprise if the packets do not
contain a source IP address configured for one of the enterprise's internal networks.
Because mobile nodes would otherwise use their home address as the source IP
address of the packets they transmit, this presents difficulty. Solutions to this
problem in Mobile IPv4 typically involve tunneling outgoing packets from the care-
of address, but then the difficulty is how to find a suitable target for the tunneled
packet from the mobile node. The only universally agreed on possibility is the home
agent, but that target introduces yet another serious routing anomaly for
communications between the mobile node and the rest of the Internet. Montenegro
has proposed the use of reverse tunnels to the home agent to counter the restriction
imposed by ingress filtering. Mobile IPv6 also offers a solution in the home address
destination option.

• User perceptions of reliability.

The design of Mobile IP is founded on the premise that connections based on TCP
should survive cell changes. However, opinion is not unanimous on the need for this
feature. Many people believe that computer communications to laptop computers
are sufficiently burst that there is no need to increase the reliability of the
connections supporting the communications. The analogy is made to fetching Web
pages by selecting the appropriate URLs. If a transfer fails, people are used to trying
again. This is tantamount to making the user responsible for the retransmission
protocol and depends for its acceptability on a widespread perception that computers
and the Internet cannot be trusted to do things right the first time. Naturally, such
assumptions are strongly distasteful to many Internet protocol engineers, myself
included. Nevertheless, the fact that products exhibiting this model are currently
economically viable cannot be denied. Hopefully in the near future better
engineering will counter this perception and increase the demand for Internet
reliability.

• Issues in IP addressing.

Mobile IP creates the perception that the mobile node is always attached to its home
network. This forms the basis for the reachability of the mobile node at an IP address
that can be conventionally associated with its fully qualified domain name (FQDN).
If the FQDN is associated with one or more other IP addresses, perhaps dynamically,
then those alternative IP addresses may deserve equal standing with the mobile
node's home address. Moreover, it is possible that such an alternative IP address
would offer a shorter routing path if, for instance, the address were apparently
located on a physical link nearer to the mobile node's care-of address, or if the
alternative address were the care-of address itself. Finally, many communications
are short-lived and depend on neither the actual identity of the mobile node nor its
FQDN, and thus do not take advantage of the simplicity afforded by use of the
mobile node's home address. These issues surrounding the mobile node's selection
of an appropriate long-term (or not-so long-term) address for use in establishing
connections are complex and are far from being resolved.

• Slow growth in the wireless LAN market.

Mobile IP has been engineered as a solution for wireless LAN location management
and communications, but the wireless LAN market has been slow to develop. It is
difficult to make general statements about the reasons for this slow development,
but with the recent ratification of the IEEE 802.11 MAC protocol, wireless LANs
may become more popular. Moreover, the bandwidth for wireless devices has been
constantly improving, so that radio and infrared devices on the market today offer
multi-megabyte-per-second data rates. Faster wireless access over standardized
MAC layers could be a major catalyst for growth of this market.

• Competition from other protocols.

Mobile IP may well face competition from alternative tunneling protocols such as
PPTP and L2TP. These other protocols, based on PPP, offer at least portability to
mobile computers. Although I believe portable operation will ultimately not be a
long-term solution, it may look quite attractive in the short term in the absence of
full Mobile IP deployment. If these alternative methods are made widely available,
it is unclear if the use of Mobile IP will be displaced or instead made more
immediately desirable as people experience the convenience of mobile computing.
In the future, it is also possible that Mobile IP could specify use of such alternative
tunneling protocols to capitalize on their deployment on platforms that do not
support IP-within-IP encapsulation.

• Triangular Routing

Triangular routing is the situation where all traffic from the correspondent node to
the mobile node is routed via the home agent. This method of routing increases the
traffic on the network as the packets are first routed to the home agent and from here
they are tunneled to the mobile node. In particular this increases the load on the home
agent.

• Congestion

The Protocol Ipv4 is not the one which can accommodate and grow with the
increasing number of users in the Mobile World. With its 32-bit addressing scheme
there can be only 4 billion Mobile Devices which can be attached at a time. The
Mobile devices grow with an average of 1000 per day only in India which of course
is a large figure to suffice in the lesser device support by the Protocol. Thus the
problem of congestion always happens during transmission. The core problem here
is with clear hearing. You might have easily found transmission delays while you
are talking which is in short the ratio of large devices using the same frequency with
the fewer devices supported. As data is highly feed in the narrow channel bandwidth
the delays and no signal issues arise within the network.

• Current Development Efforts

Mobile IP has been studied in a number of wireless communication research

projects. At the University of California at Berkeley, Mobile IP is being used to
construct vertical handoffs between dissimilar media (for example, infrared, radio
LANs, wide-area cellular, and satellite), depending upon error rates and bandwidth
availability. Other factors such as cost and predictive service might also be taken
into account. CMU's Monarch project has been the focus of investigation into
campus wireless networks, Mobile IP, Mobile IPv6, and ad-hoc networking. Other
academic efforts have been proceeding at the University of Portland, University of
Alabama, University of Texas, UCLA, Macquarie University, SUNY Binghamton,
University of Singapore, Swedish Royal Institute of Technology, and many others.
Two books about Mobile IP have recently been published.

9. CHANGES WITH IP VERSION 6

How will Mobile IP change when IP version 6 is adopted? IPv6 includes many
features for streamlining mobility support that are missing in IP version 4 (current
version), including Stateless Address Auto configuration and Neighbor Discovery.
IPv6 also attempts to drastically simplify the process of renumbering, which could
be critical to the future rout ability of the Internet. Because the number of mobile
computers accessing the Internet will likely increase, efficient support for mobility
will make a decisive difference in the Internet's future performance. This, along with
the growing importance of the Internet and the Web, indicates the need to pay
attention to supporting mobility.

Mobility Support in IPv6, as proposed by the Mobile IP working group, follows the
design for Mobile IPv4. It retains the ideas of a home network, home agent, and the
use of encapsulation to deliver packets from the home network to the mobile node's
current point of attachment. While discovery of a care-of address is still required, a
mobile node can configure it’s a care-of address by using Stateless Address Auto
configuration and Neighbor Discovery. Thus, foreign agents are not required to
support mobility in IPv6. IPv6-within-IPv6 tunneling is also already specified.

9.1 Route Optimization

Route optimization provides a means for any node to maintain a binding cache
containing the care-of address of one or more mobile nodes. When sending an IP
datagram to a mobile node, if the sender has a binding cache entry for the destination
mobile node, it may tunnel the datagram directly to the care-of address indicated in
the cached mobility binding.

In the absence of any binding cache entry, datagrams destined for a mobile node will
be routed to a mobile node’s home network in the same way as any other IP
datagram, and then tunneled to the mobile node’s current care-of address by the
mobile node’s home agent. This is the only routing mechanism supported by the
base Mobile IP protocol. As a side effect of this indirect routing of a datagram to a
mobile node, it would be nice if the original sender of the datagram were informed
of the mobile node’s current mobility binding, giving the sender an opportunity to
cache the binding. In Figure 7, the Internet host is going to have to route each
datagram for the mobile node indirectly, through its home agent. If the internet host
had a binding cache entry for the mobile node, it would be able to send packets
directly back to the mobile node without the services of the home agent.
 Figure 7. Triangular Routing

9.2 Security

One of the biggest differences between IPv6 and IPv4 is that all IPv6 nodes are
expected to implement strong authentication and encryption features to improve
Internet security. This affords a major simplification for IPv6 mobility support, since
all authentication procedures can be assumed to exist when needed and do not have
to be specified in the Mobile IPv6 protocol. Even with the security features in IPv6,
however, the current working group draft for IPv6 mobility support specifies the use
of authentication procedures as infrequently as possible. The reasons for this are
twofold. First, good authentication comes at the cost of performance and so should
be required only occasionally. Second, questions about the availability of Internet-
wide key management are far from resolved at this time.

9.3 Source Routing

In contrast to the way in which route optimization is specified in IPv4; in IPv6

correspondent nodes do not tunnel packets to mobile nodes. Instead, they use IPv6
routing headers, which implement a variation of IPv4's source routing option. A
number of early proposals for supporting mobility in IPv4 specified a similar use of
source routing options, but two main problems precluded their use:

• IPv4 source routing options require the receiver of source-routed packets to

follow the reversed path to the sender back along the indicated intermediate
nodes. This means that malicious nodes using source routes from remote
locations within the Internet could impersonate other nodes, a problem
exacerbated by the lack of authentication protocols.

• Existing routers exhibit terrible performance when handling source routes.

Consequently, the results of deploying other protocols that use source routes
have not been favorable.

However, the objections to the use of source routes do not apply to IPv6, because
IPv6's more careful specification eliminates the need for source-route reversal and
lets routers ignore options that do not need their attention. Consequently,
correspondent nodes can use routing headers without penalty. This allows the mobile
node to easily determine when a correspondent node does not have the right care-of
address. Packets delivered by encapsulation instead of by source routes in a routing
header must have been sent by correspondent nodes that need to receive binding
updates from the mobile node. It is a further point of contrast to route optimization
in IPv4 that, in IPv6 mobility support, the mobile node delivers binding updates to
correspondent nodes instead of to the home agent. In IPv6, key management
between the mobile node and correspondent node is more likely to be available.

Other features supported by IPv6 mobility include

• coexistence with Internet ingress filtering;
• smooth handoffs, which in Mobile IPv4 is specified for foreign agents as part of
route optimization;
• Renumbering of home networks; and Automatic home agent discovery.

10. Improving the performance of handoff in mobile IP

Synopsis: Present implementations of mobile IP often fail to meet expectations of

mobile applications when it comes to issues of packet loss and performance. We
discuss various ways of moving closer to expectations.
The Internet suite of protocols (TCP/IP) assumes that the end-systems of an active
networking session are stationary. If any of the end-points moves, the session breaks.
This is a problem with mobile devices. Since redesigning the protocol suite is
infeasible, the IETF mobile IP standard has taken the approach of providing
additional support at the networking levels. Communication with a mobile device
presents two conflicting demands:

a) To preserve active sessions, the device must retain its IP address.

b) To route packets to a mobile device, its IP address should be dependent on its

location. The IETF standard resolves this conflict by introducing multiple IP
addresses for a mobile device. A mobile device retains its home address (see
Note 1) irrespective of its location.

Note 1. A mobile device (also called a mobile host) is identified by an IP address

chosen from the address range of its starting network location, also called its home
network. This address is called the home address of the mobile device.

When the device is at the home network, packets can be delivered as usual. When
the device moves to a foreign network (see Note 2) it acquires a care-of address
(COA).

Note 2. A network outside the home network of the mobile device is called a foreign
network. Routing decisions are often made at the network level; thus, when a mobile
host reaches a foreign network, there should a mechanism in place to forward
packets meant for the mobile device from its home network to the foreign network.
Packet redirection is accomplished using artifacts called home agents (HAs) and
foreign agents (FAs; see Note 3).

Note 3. A home agent (HA) is a software module running on a host in the home
network. The HA provides address translation so that a packet meant for a mobile
device reaches its present point of attachment. The foreign agent (FA) is a software
module running on a host in each foreign network that the mobile device needs to
visit. There can be any number of foreign and home agents in a network. If there is
any FA with which the mobile host has currently registered, the HA forwards the
packet to this FA. Else it forwards the packet directly to the mobile device.
The COA is either the address of a FA that can redirect packets to the device or the
DHCP address of the device itself. The device registers with the HA and FA (if any)
to ensure that packets are delivered to it at its new location. Unfortunately, these
implementations suffer from poor performance during handoff. Suppose a mobile
device moves from network A to network B. Packets sent to network A during this
movement cannot be acknowledged by the device. This will be interpreted as packet
loss due to congestion, and results in several problems including large
retransmission intervals and reduced window size. Solutions involving hierarchical
registration or multicasting have often been used. Another solution is through active
routers that intercept registration messages to update routing tables. Unfortunately,
most real world networks lack support for these techniques. In yet another scheme
packet are acknowledged and buffered at FAs. This eliminates the adverse effects
that result from interpretation of unacknowledged packets as packet loss due to
congestion. The obvious problem with this scheme is that it requires support for FAs.
The performance problem is worse with implementations such as Mosquito Net,
which do away with FAs altogether to make mobile IP usable on a wider set of
networks. There is just one HA, in addition to mobile host (MH) software on the
mobile device.

For such implementations, packet loss is significant as there is no entity to store the
packets at network A as the device moves to B. The use of multicasting or active
routers is also ruled out as these require special network support. How can we get
reasonable performance with implementations such as Mosquito Net? One possible
approach that we propose is to use smart buffering at the HA. In this scheme, the
mobile device, in the process of moving from network A to B, initiates the process
at the HA by sending it an ICMP request rather that a full-fledged registration
message. The HA buffers unacknowledged packets sent to network A, as well as
newly arriving packets. However, it forwards the packet only after the registration
is complete. The HA adopts a small and accurate retransmission interval and normal
window-size to avoid the problems discussed above arising due to misinterpreted
congestion. This scheme requires changes only to the HA and MH, and hence can
work with any foreign network. Smart buffering is best implemented in conjunction
with a framework that dynamically discovers and leverages support for FAs, active
routers, multicasting etc. in a given network, so that their performance advantages
are realized. Designing such as architecture is of course an engineering challenge.
11. CONCLUSION

As this brief introduction to mobile networking has shown, Mobile IP has great
potential. Security needs are getting active attention and will benefit from the
deployment efforts underway. Within the IETF, Mobile IP is likely to move from a
proposed standard to a draft standard in the near future.

The IETF standardization process requires the working group to rigorously

demonstrate interoperability among various independent implementations before the
protocol can advance. FTP Software has hosted two interoperability testing sessions,
and many vendors have taken advantage of the opportunity. Test results have given
added confidence that the Mobile IP specification is sound, implementable, and of
diverse interest throughout the Internet community. Only a few minor revisions have
been needed to ensure the specification can be interpreted in only one way by the
network protocol engineers and programmers who must implement it.

It is possible that the deployment pace of Mobile IP will track that of IPv6 or that
the requirements for supporting mobility in IPv6 nodes will give additional impetus
to the deployment of both IPv6 and mobile networking. The increased user
convenience and the reduced need for application awareness of mobility can be a
major driving force for adoption. Since both IPv6 and Mobile IP have little direct
effect on the operating systems of mobile computers outside of the network layer of
the protocol stack, application designers should find this to be an acceptable
programming environment. Of course, everything depends heavily on the
willingness of platform and router vendors to implement Mobile IP and/or IPv6, but
indications are strong that most major vendors already have implementations either
finished or underway.
The desire to improve the performance of mobile IP conflicts with the desire to use
mobile IP on a wide set of networks. We have motivated one possible solution based
on smart buffering and dynamic network service discovery.
12. References and Bibliography

 Mobile Computing – K.H.Wandra

 Data Communications and Networking – Behrouz
Forouzen www.ipv6.com.cn www.whatis.com
www.ipv6.net.cn www.slashdot.org
www.wired.com www.howstuffworks.com