UNDERSTANDING OF MOBILE IP

To accomplish this, mobile IP established the visited network as a foreign node and the home network as the home node. Mobile IP uses a tunneling protocol to allow messages from the PDN to be directed to the mobile node's IP address. This is accomplished by way of routing messages to the foreign node for delivery via tunneling the original IP address inside a packet destined for the temporary IP address assigned to the mobile node by the foreign node. The Home Agent and Foreign Agent continuously advertise their services on the network through an Agent Discovery process, enabling the Home Agent to recognize when a new Foreign Agent is acquired and allowing the Mobile Node to register a new Care of Address. This method allows for seamless communications between the mobile node and applications residing on the PDN, allowing for seamless, always-on connectivity for mobile data applications and wireless computing. Connectivity to the Internet while in motion is becoming an extremely important part of computing research and development. Mobile IP, created by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), is a standard protocol that builds on Internet Protocol by making mobility of a user transparent to applications and higher-level protocols such as Transfer Control Protocol. Mobile IP can be seen as the least common mobility denominator – providing seamless macro mobility solutions among the diversity of access. This paper will attempt to introduce Mobile IP from a technical point of view, while taking into consideration that the reader may not know anything about Mobile IP. However, the reader should know some networking basics before reading further. Building on these concepts, this paper will then discuss effective implementations of Mobile IP, the protocols used by Mobile IP and the importance of Mobile IP. This paper will also introduce Mobile IP from a consumer perspective, i.e. electronic devices (and their Operating Systems) which allow networking mobility.