Page 74 - Mobile Computing

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Working of Mobile IP

The working of Mobile IP can be described in 3 phases:

Agent Discovery

In the Agent Discovery phase, the mobile nodes discover their Foreign and Home
Agents. The Home Agent and Foreign Agent advertise their services on the
network using the ICMP Router Discovery Protocol (IRDP).

Registration

The registration phase is responsible for informing the current location of the
home agent and foreign agent for the correct forwarding of packets.

Tunnelling

This phase is used to establish a virtual connection as a pipe for moving the data
packets between a tunnel entry and a tunnel endpoint.

Applications of Mobile IP

The mobile IP technology is used in many applications where the sudden changes
in network connectivity and IP address can cause problems. It was designed to

support seamless and continuous Internet connectivity.

It is used in many wired and wireless environments where users have to carry
their mobile devices across multiple LAN subnets.

Although Mobile IP is not required within cellular systems such as 3G, it is often
used in 3G systems to provide seamless IP mobility between different packet data
serving node (PDSN) domains.

MOBILE IP (Problem situation)

 The address of a host consists of two parts (1) the higher order bits ofthe
address determines the n/w on which the host resides (2) the remaining low
order bits determine the host number. IP decides the nest-hop by
determining the network information from the destination address of the
packet. On the other hand, higher level layers like TCP maintain on
formation about connections that are indexed by quadruplet containing the

IP addresses of both the endpoints and the port numbers. Thus, while trying
to support mobility on the Internet under the existing protocol suite, we are
faced with two mutually conflicting requirements: