UNIT II

MOBILE INTERNET PROTOCOL AND

TRANSPORT LAYER
by
S.Keerthana AP/CSE
VCEW
Mobile IP
 The Internet 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 is responsible for routing a packet to any

host, connected to the Internet, that is

uniquely identified by an assigned IP
address.
Mobile IP
 Mobile Internet Protocol (Mobile IP) was proposed by the
Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF).
 The mobile IP allows mobile computers to stay connected to
the Internet regardless of their location and without having
to continually change their IP address.
 In other words, Mobile IP is a standard protocol that extends
the Internet Protocol by making mobility transparent to
applications and to higher level protocols like TCP.
 Every mobile user needs continuous network connectivity
irrespective of his physical location.
 The traditional IP does not support user mobility.
 Mobile IP was created by extending IP to enable users to
keep the same IP address while travelling to different
networks.
Terminologies of mobile IP
Correspondent node (CN)
 This is the node with which the mobile node
under consideration (that has possibly
moved to a foreign network) is
communicating with.
 Communication Partner (maybe sender or

receiver)
Home network
The home network of a mobile device is the
network within which the device
receives its identifying IP address
(home address).
 Within the home network, there is no need

of mobile IP.
Home agent (HA)
 The HA stores information about all mobile
nodes whose permanent home address is in
the network assigned to the HA.
 The HA maintains location directory(The

location registry keeps track of the node

locations using the current care-of-address
of the MN) of the mobile handsets belonging
permanently to the home network
 And acts as a router for delivery of

datagrams to the MN, when it is away from

home.
Foreign agent (FA)
 The foreign agent is a router in a foreign
network that functions as the point of
attachment for a mobile node (MN) when it
roams to the foreign network.
 The packets from the home agent are sent

to the foreign network which delivers it to

mobile node.
Foreign network
 The foreign network is the current subnet to
which the mobile node visiting.
 It is different from home network.
 In other words, a foreign network is the

network in which a mobile node is operating

when away from its home network.
Care-of-address (COA)
 It is an address that identifies the mobile
node's current location.
 It can be viewed as the end of a tunnel from

the home agent.

 The packets sent to the MN are delivered to

COA. COA is typically associated with the

mobile node's foreign agent (FA).
Tunnel
 It is the path taken by the encapsulated
packets.
Data transfer in Mobile
System
 The COA can be any one of the following
two types:
 (a) Foreign agent COA: The COA is an IP

address of foreign agent (FA)

 (b) Co-located COA: When the mobile node

(MN) acquires a temporary IP address, that

address acts as the COA
Note: The co-located address (temporary IP
address) can be acquired using services like
dynamic host configuration protocol (DHCP).
Agent Discovery:
 During call establishment it is necessary
for a mobile node to determine its foreign
agent. This task is referred to as agent
discovery. The following two discovery
methods are popularly used:
 (1) Agent advertisement
 (2) Agent solicitation
Agent advertisement

 Generally the foreign and the home agents

advertise their presence through periodic
agent advertisement messages.
 An agent advertisement message, lists one

or more care- of-addresses and a flag

indicating whether it is a home agent or a
foreign agent.
 Agent advertisement is a popularly used

method in agent discovery

Agent solicitation
 In case a mobile node (MN) does not receive any COA, then the MN
should send an agent solicitation message .
 However, it is important to ensure that these agent solicitation
messages do not flood the network.
 A mobile node can usually send up to three solicitation messages (one
per second) as soon as it enters a new network.
 The basic purpose of the solicitation messages sent by a mobile node
(MN) is to search for a foreign agent (FA).
 For a highly dynamic wireless network in which MNs move at great
speed, even a time interval of the order of a second between these
messages is considered to be too long.
 If an MN does not receive any address in response to its solicitation
messages, then to avoid network flooding(broadcast an incoming
packet to all outgoing links except the node from which it originated),
the MN should exponentially reduce the rate of sending the solicitation
messages.
Tunnelling and
encapsulation
 Tunnelling establishes a virtual pipe for the packets available
between a tunnel's entry and an endpoint.

 Tunnelling is the process of sending a packet via a tunnel and

it is achieved by a mechanism called encapsulation.

 Encapsulation refers to assembling a packet's existing header

and data in the data part of the new packet.

 On the other hand, disassembling the data part of an

encapsulated packet is called decapsulation.

 Whenever a packet is sent from a higher protocol layer to a

lower protocol layer, the operations of encapsulation and
decapsulation usually take place.
Mobile IP-Packet Delivery
Desirable Features of
Mobile IP
 Some of the features required of mobile IP are the followings

 Transparency: A mobile end-system should continue to keep its IP address

and there should not be any disruption of communication after any movement.
 In other words, the IP address is to be managed transparently and there
should not be any effect of mobility on any on-going communication.

 Compatibility: Mobile IP should be compatible with the existing Internet

protocols

 Security : Mobile IP should, as far as possible, provide users with secure

communications over the Internet.

 Efficiency and Scalability: In the event of worldwide support, there can be a

large number of mobile systems in the whole Internet. This should neither
result in large number of messages nor should it incur too much computational
overhead. It should also be scalable to support billions of moving hosts
worldwide.
Key Mechanism Used in
Mobile
 The specific protocols used by the basic
mechanisms have also been shown.
Observe that the registration process works
over UDP and the discovery protocol over
ICMP.
Discovering the care-of-
address
 Each mobile node uses a discovery protocol to
identify the respective home and foreign agents.
The discovery of the care-of-address consists of
the following important steps.
Discovering the care-of-
address
1. Mobile agents advertise their presence by periodically broadcasting the agent
advertisement messages.

2. The mobile node receiving the agent advertisement message observes

whether the message is from its own home agent and determines whether it is
on the home network or on a foreign network.

3. If a mobile node does not wish to wait for the periodic advertisement. it can
send out agent solicitation messages that will be responded to by a mobility
agent.

The process of agent advertisements, involves the following activities:

 Foreign agents send messages to advertise the available care-of- addresses.

 Home agents send advertisements to make themselves known.
 Mobile hosts can issue agent solicitations to actively seek information.
 If a mobile host has not heard from the foreign agent to which its current care-
of-address belongs, it takes up another care-of-address.
Registering the care-of-
addres
If a mobile node discovers that it is on the home network. It
operates normally without using any mobility services.

While a node has moved to a different network, if the mobile node

obtains a care-of-address from a foreign agent, then this address
should be registered with the home agent.

The mobile node sends a request for registration to its home agent
along with the care-of-address information.

whenever the home agent receives the registration request

information. The routing table is updated and it sends back the
registration reply to the mobile node.

The mobile node makes use of the registration procedure to intimate

the care-of-address to a home agent.
steps of the registration
process
1 If the mobile node travels to a foreign network, it registers with
the foreign agent by sending a registration request message
which includes the permanent IP address of the mobile host and
the IP address of its home agent.
2 The foreign agent in turn performs the registration process on
behalf of the mobile host by sending a Registration Request
containing the permanent IP address of the mobile node and the
IP address of the foreign agent to the home agent.
3 When the home agent receives the Registration Request, it
updates the mobility binding by associating the care-of-address
of the mobile node with its home address.
4 The home agent then sends an acknowledgement to the foreign
agent.
5 The foreign agent in turn updates its visitors list by inserting the
entry for the mobile node and relays the reply to the mobile
node.
IP encapsulation in mobile
IP
Dynamic Host Configuration
Protocol (DHCP)
 DHCP was developed based on bootstrap protocol
(BOOTP), DHCP provides several types of information to a
user including its IP address.
 To manage dynamic configuration information and dynamic
IP addresses, IETF standardized an extension to BOOTP
known as dynamic host configuration protocol (DHCP).
 The DHCP client and server work together to handle the
roaming status and to assign IP address on a new network
efficiently.
 The DHCP server allocates an IP address from a pool of IP
addresses to a client.
Significance of Dynamic Host
Configuration Protocol
 DHCP is an extension to the BOOTP and compatible with it.
 For example, if a host is running BOOTP, it can also request
configuration (example: static configuration) from a DHCP server node.

Three important mechanisms for IP address allocation

 Automatic allocation: In automatic allocation, DHCP assigns a

permanent IP address to a particular client.
 Dynamic allocation: In dynamic allocation, DHCP assigns IP address
to a client for a specific period of time.
 Manual allocation: In manual allocation, a client's IP address is
assigned by the network administrator, where the DHCP is used to
inform the address assigned to clients.
Transport Layer