Internet Mobility Support Optimized for Client Access and Its Scalable Authentication Framework

Abstract

Besides allowing a moving Mobile Node (MN) to keep receiving datagrams, the use of permanent home address in Mobile-IP also makes MN available to accept new connections from Corresponding Nodes. However, it’s expected that in most cases MN only runs client sides of the applications that always initiate the connections. Given this observation and the often-disconnected nature of MN, the virtue of permanently associating MN with one fixed home address and Home Agent becomes questionable, while it already imposes potential inefficiency in its indirect routing. We argue that it’s necessary to provide an option that lets client-access MN make use of multiple home addresses and Home Agents that are based on connection sessions. We propose a new enhancement scheme providing such a mechanism in this paper, which aims to let MN trade some additional lightweight local processing for better routing and seamless roaming. A further mechanism to ensure smooth handoff under this new scheme is proposed as well. Finally, we complete the paper by outlining a scalable authentication protocol for securing its operation, with the use of minimal public key cryptography.