 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.
Mobile IP is an open standard, defined by the Internet Engineering
Task Force (IETF) RFC 2002, that allows users to keep the same IP
address, stay connected, and maintain ongoing applications while
roaming between IP networks. Mobile IP is scalable for the Internet
because it is based on IP—any media that can support IP can support
Mobile IP.
Mobile IP’ signifies that, while a user is connected to applications
across the Internet and the user’s point of attachment changes
dynamically, all connections are maintained despite the change in
underlying network properties
 Similar to the handoff/roaming situation in cellular network
 Mobile IP allows the mobile node to use two IP addresses called
home address and care of address
 The home address is static and known to everybody as the identity
of the host
 The care of address changes at each new point of attachment and
can be thought of as the mobile node’s location specific address
Mobile Node (MN)
system (node) that can change the point of connection to the network
without changing its IP address
Home Agent (HA)
router in the home network of the MN, which registers the location of
the MN, tunnels IP datagrams to the COA when MN is away from home.
Foreign Agent (FA)
router in the current visited network of the MN, which forwards the
tunneled datagrams to the MN, also acts as the default router for the
registered MN
Care-of Address (COA)
address of the current tunnel end-point for the MN (at FA or MN) actual
location of the MN from an IP point of view can be chosen, e.g., via DHCP
Correspondent Node (CN)
communication partner
Let’s take the case of mobile node (A) and another host (server X). The
following steps take place:
 Server X wants to transmit an IP datagram to node A. The home address of
A is advertised and known to X. X does not know whether A is in the home
network or somewhere else. Therefore, X sends the packet to A with A’s
home address as the destination IP address in the IP header. The IP
datagram is routed to A’s home network.
 At the A’s home network, the incoming IP datagram is intercepted by the
home agent. The home agent discovers that A is in a foreign network. A care
of address has been allocated to A by this foreign network and available
with the home agent. The home agent encapsulates the entire datagram
inside a new IP datagram, with A’s care of address in the IP header. This new
datagram with the care of address as the destination address is
retransmitted by the home agent.
 At the foreign network, the incoming IP datagram is intercepted by the
foreign agent. The foreign agent is the counterpart of the home agent in the
foreign network. The foreign agent strips off the outer IP header, and
delivers the original datagram to A.
 A intends to respond to this message and sends traffic to X. In this
example, X is not mobile; therefore X has a fixed IP address. For
routing A’s IP datagram to X, each datagram is sent to some router
in the foreign network. Typically, this router is the foreign agent. A
uses X’s IP static address as the destination address in the IP header.
 The IP datagram from A to X travels directly across the network,
using X’s IP address as the destination address.

 Discovery - A mobile node uses a discovery procedure to

identify prospective home agents and foreign agents.
 Registration - A mobile node uses a registration procedure to
inform its home agent of its care-of address.
 Tunneling - Tunneling procedure is used to forward IP
datagrams from a home address to a care of address.
– Extension of ICMP Router Advertisement
– Home agents and foreign agents broadcast agent
advertisements at regular intervals
– Mobile IP uses control messages that are sent to and from
UDP port 334.
– Agent advertisement
 Allows for the detection of mobility agents
 Lists one or more available care-of addresses
 Informs the mobile node about special features
 Mobile node selects its care-of address
 Mobile node checks whether the agent is a home agent or
foreign agent
– MNs can solicit for agents if they have not heard an agent
advertisement in awhile or use some other mechanism to obtain
a COA or temp. IP address (e.g. DHCP).
– MNs know they are home when they recognize their HA
Registration: used by a MN to inform the FA that it is visiting.

The new care of address of the MN is sent to the HA.

Registration expires, duration is negotiated during registration.

Mobile must re-register before it expires

All registrations are authenticated

The MN sends a registration request in to the FA which passes it

along to the home agent. The HA responds to the FA which then
informs the MN that all is in order and registration is complete.
The MN needs to be authenticated. Each MN, FA & HA support
a mobility Security Association (SA) for mobile entities indexed
by their Security Parameters Index (SPI) & IP address.
Registration messages between a MN & its HA must be
authenticated with an authorization enabling exchange called
Mobile- Home Authentication Extension.
Using 128-bit secret-key shared between MN & HA and HMAC-
MD5 hashing algorithm, a digital signature is generated, which
allows the agent to authenticate the MN
At the end of registration, a triplet containing the HA address,
COA & registration life time is maintained in the HA. This is
called a binding for the MN. The HA maintains this association
until the registration life expires.
The MN may act as its own FA by using a co-located COA.
A co-located COA is an IP address obtained by the mobile node
that is associated with the foreign network.
If MN is using a co-located COA, then the registration happens
directly with the HA
 Routing/Encapsulation/Tunneling:
consists of the delivery of the packets to
the mobile node at its current care of
address.
Sender does not need to know
that the destination is a MN.
HA intercepts all packets for the
MN and passes them along to MN
using a tunnel.
MN communicates directly with
the CN.
Referred to as Triangle Routing
original IP header original data

new IP header new data

outer header inner header original data

• Three types of encapsulation protocols are specified for
Mobile IP:
: required to be supported. Full IP
header added to the original IP packet. The new header
contains HA address as source and Care of Address as
destination.

: optional. Requires less overhead

but requires changes to the original header. Destination
address is changed to Care of Address and Source IP address
is maintained as is.

optional. Allows
packets of a different protocol suite to be encapsulated by
another protocol suite.
• Type of tunneling/encapsulation supported is indicated
in registration.
 tunneling in its simplest form has all
packets go to home network (HA) and then sent to MN via
a tunnel.
– This involves two IP routes that need to be set-up, one original
and the second the tunnel route.
– Causes unnecessary network overhead and adds to the latency.

allows the correspondent node to

learn the current location of the MN and tunnel its own
packets directly. Problems arise with
correspondent node has to update/maintain its
cache.
HA has to communicate with the
correspondent node to do authentication, i.e., security
association is with HA not with MN.
The route optimization extension adds a conceptual data structure, the binding
cache, to the correspondent node and to the foreign agent. The binding cache
contains bindings for mobile nodes' home addresses and their current care-of
addresses. With the binding the correspondent node can tunnel datagrams
directly to the mobile node's care-of address.

Route optimization adds four new UDP-messages to the Mobile IPv4 protocol:
Binding update, binding acknowledgement, binding request and binding warning.
 Mobile IP represents a simple & scalable global mobility solution, but
is not appropriate in support of fast & seamless handoff control.
 Cellular IP is a new robust protocol that is optimized to support local
mobility but efficiently interworks with Mobile IP to provide wide area
mobility
 Cellular IP shows great benefit in comparison to existing host mobility
protocols for environments where mobile hosts migrate frequently.
This is very much valid as wireless internet becomes widespread.
 CIP can accommodate large no of users by maintaining distributed
Paging and Routing caches
 Also CIP requires no new packet formats, encapsulations, or address
space allocations beyond what is present in IP.
Two parallel structures of mappings (PC &RC)
1 - idle MH keeps PC upto-date
2 - PC mappings used to find the location of idle MH
3 - maintains RC mappings until actively connected
4 - routing of data packets to MH

Paging Caches maintain mappings for stationary & idle hosts;

where Routing Caches maintains mappings for mobile hosts.
Timeout interval for PC mappings is large, where as for RC it is in
Packet timescale.
• Overall system must be able to manage
– The handoff between cells within the same access
network
– The handoff between different access networks
• Mobile IP (MIP)
– Used as an inter-subnet mobility protocol
– Macro-mobility
• Cellular IP (CIP)
– Intra subnet mobility
– Micro-mobility
– Paging management
23
  Successor to today’s IP version 4 protocol (IPv4)
 Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) has produced a comprehensive set of
specifications (RFC 1287, 1752, 1886, 1971, 1993, 2292, 2373, 2460, 2473, etc.) that
define the next-generation IP protocol originally known as ‘IPNg’
 Uses 128 bit addresses for each packet creating a virtually infinite number of IP
addresses (approximately 3.4*10**38 IP addresses) as opposed to 3758096384 IPv4
addresses
3FFE:085B:1F1F:0000:0000:0000:00A9:1234

8 groups of 16-bit hexadecimal numbers separated by “:”

Leading zeros can be removed

3FFE:85B:1F1F::A9:1234

:: = all zeros in one or more group of 16-bit hexadecimal numbers

 0 15 16 31
vers hlen TOS total length Removed (6)
identification flags flag-offset • ID, flags, flag offset
20 TTL protocol header checksum • TOS, hlen
bytes
source address • header checksum
destination address
Changed (3)
options and padding
• total length => payload
IPv4 • protocol => next header
• TTL => hop limit
vers traffic class flow-label
Added (2)
payload length next header hop limit
• traffic class
40
bytes
source address • flow label

destination address
Expanded
• address 32 to 128 bits
IPv6
 There are global addresses and local addresses
 Global addresses are used for routing of global Internet
 Link local addresses are available within a subnet
 IPv6 uses hierarchical addressing with three level of addresses
 Includes a Public Topology (the 48 bit external routing prefix)
 Site Topology (typically a 16 bit subnet number)
 Interface Identifier (typically an automatically generated 64 bit
number unique on the local LAN segment)
 IPv6 Comes native with a security protocol called IP Security (IPSec),
which is a standards-based method of providing privacy, integrity
and authenticity to information transferred across IP networks
 Diffie-Hellman key exchange mechanism for deriving key between
peers on a public network
 Public key cryptography to guarantee the identity of the two parties
and avoid man-in-the-middle attacks
 Bulk encryption algorithms, such as 3DES, for encrypting the data
 Keyed hash algorithms, such as HMAC, combined with traditional
hash algorithms such as MD5 or SHA for providing packet
authentication
 Digital certificates signed by a certificate authority to act as digital
ID cards
 IPSec provides IP network layer encryption
 Migration of the network components to be able to support
IPv6 packets. Using IP tunneling, IPv6 packets can propagate
over an IPv4 envelope. Existing routers can support IP
tunneling.

 Migration of the computing nodes in the network. This will

need the operating system upgrades so that they support IPv6
along with IPv4. Upgraded systems will have both IPv4 and IPv6
stacks.

 Migration of networking applications in both client and server

systems. This requires porting of the applications from IPv4 to
IPv6 environment.
 Tunneling is one of the key deployment strategies for both service
providers as well as enterprises during the period of IPv4 and IPv6
coexistence.
 Tunneling service providers can offer an end-to-end IPv6 service without
major upgrades to the infrastructure and without impacting current IPv4
services.

 Manually created tunnels such as IPv6 manually configured tunnels (RFC

2893)
 IPv6 over IPv4 tunnels
 Semiautomatic tunnel mechanisms such as that employed by tunnel broker
services
 Fully automatic tunnel mechanisms such as IPv4 compatible
 IPv6 with hierarchical addressing scheme can manage IP mobility
much efficiently.
 IPv6 also attempts to simplify the process of renumbering which
could be critical to the future routing of the Internet traffic.
 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 its care of address by using Stateless Address Auto-
configuration and Neighbor Discovery. Thus, foreign agents are not
required to support mobility in IPv6.
1. There is no need to deploy special routers as "foreign agents", as in Mobile IPv4. Mobile IPv6
operates in any location without any special support required from the local router.

2. Support for route optimization is a fundamental part of the Mobile IPV6.

3.Mobile IPv6 route optimization can operate securely even without pre-arranged security associations.

4. Support is also integrated into Mobile IPv6 for allowing route optimization to coexist efficiently with
routers that perform "ingress filtering".

5. The IPv6 Neighbor Unreachability Detection assures symmetric reachability between the mobile node
and its default router in the current location.

6. Most packets sent to a mobile node while away from home in Mobile IPv6 are sent using an IPv6
routing header rather than IP encapsulation, reducing the amount of resulting overhead compared
to Mobile IPv4.

7. Mobile IPv6 is decoupled from any particular link layer, as it uses IPv6 Neighbor Discovery instead of
ARP. This also improves the robustness of the protocol.

8. The use of IPv6 encapsulation (and the routing header) removes the need in Mobile IPv6 to manage
"tunnel soft state".

9. The dynamic home agent address discovery mechanism in Mobile IPv6 returns a single reply to the
mobile node. The directed broadcast approach used in IPv4 returns separate replies from each
home agent.