Amity School of Engineering & Technology

Mobile IP

Dr. Manoj Kumar Shukla

Associate Professor
Department of Computer Science & Engineering
ASET, Amity University, Noida
E-mail:– mkshukla@amity.edu

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 Introduction
• Wireless devices offering IP connectivity
• PDA, handhelds, digital cellular phones, etc.
• Mobile networking
• Computing activities are not disrupted when the
user changes the computer’s point of
attachment to the Internet
• All the needed reconnection occurs
automatically and non-interactively
• Technical obstacles
• Internet Protocol (IP) routing scheme
• Security concerns

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 Goals of mobile IP
The major goals of mobile IP were as follows:
• To continue to work with the exiting TCP/IP protocol suite.
• To provide Internet wide mobility, allowing a host the same IP
address, called ‘home address’.
• To optimeze local area mobility without sacrificing performance or
functionality of the general case.
• To leave the transport layer and higher protocols untouched.
• To ensure that no application needs to change in order to run on
or to be used from mobile hosts(MHs)
• To ensure theat the infrastructure, that is , non-MH, routers,
routing protocols, etc are not changed either.
• To see the mobility is handled at the network layer.
• To ensure that the sollution scales well and minimizes potential
points of failure, and
• To ensure mimimum power consumption, since mobile nodes are
likely to be battery powered.

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 Requirements

• Compatibility
• Transparency
• calability and efficiency
• Security

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 Nomadicity
• How mobility will affect the protocol stack

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 Nomadicity (cont)
• Layer 2 (data link layer)
– Collision detection à collision avoidance
– Dynamic range of the signals is very large, so
that a transmitting station cannot effectively
distinguish incoming weak signals from noise
and the effects of its own transmissions
– Cell size (frequency reuse)

• Layer 3 (network layer)

– Changing the routing of datagrams destined
for the mobile nodes

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 Nomadicity (cont)
• Layer 4 (transport layer)
– Congestion control is based on packet loss
– However, packet loss à congestion?
– Other reasons for packet loss
Ø Noisy wireless channel, During handoff process

• Top layer (application layer)

– Automatic configuration
– Service discovery
– Link awareness à adaptability
– Environment awareness
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Mobile IP

Tunneling

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 Mobile IP (cont)
• Idea
– New IP address associated with the new point
of attachment is required

• Two IP addresses for mobile node

– Home address: static
– Care-of address: topologically significant
address

• Home network, home agent

• Foreign network, foreign agent
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 Mobile IP (cont)
• Three Mobile IP mechanisms
– 1. Discovering the care-of address
– 2. Registering the care-of address
– 3. Tunneling to the care-of address

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 Mobile IP (cont)
• 1. Discovery
– Extension of ICMP Router Advertisement
– Home agents and foreign agents broadcast
agent advertisements at regular intervals
– Agent advertisement
Ø Allows for the detection of mobility agents
Ø Lists one or more available care-of addresses
Ø Informs the mobile node about special features
Ø Mobile node selects its care-of address
Ø Mobile node checks whether the agent is a home
agent or foreign agent
– Mobile node issues an ICMP router solicitation
message
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 Mobile IP (cont)
• 2. Registration
– Once a mobile node has a care-of address, its
home agent must find out about it

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Registration request Message

Registration reply Message

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 Mobile IP (cont)
• Secure the Registration Procedure
– The home agent must be certain registration
was originated by the mobile node and not by
some malicious node
– Security association: Message Digest 5 (MD5)
– Replay attacks
Ø A malicious node could record valid registrations for
later replay, effectively disrupting the ability of the
home agent to tunnel to the current care-of address
of the mobile node at that later time
Ø Identification field that changes with every new
registration
Ø Use of timestamp or random numbers

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 Mobile IP (cont)
– Foreign agents do not have to authenticate
themselves to the mobile node or home agent
– What about a bogus foreign agent?
Ø Impersonates a real foreign agent by following
protocol and offering agent advertisements to the
mobile node
Ø The bogus agent could refuse to forward de-
capsulated packets to the mobile node when they
were received.
Ø The result is no worse than if any node were tricked
into using the wrong default router, which is possible
using unauthenticated router advertisements

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 Mobile IP (cont)
• 3. Tunneling to the care-of address

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 Mobile IPv6
• Mobility support in IPv6
– Follows the design for Mobile IPv4, using
encapsulation to deliver packets from the home
network to the mobile point of attachment
• Route Optimization
– Similar to IPv4
– Delivering binding updates directly to
correspondent nodes
Ø (home address, care-of address, registration lifetime)

• Security
– IPv6 nodes are expected to implement strong
authentication and encryption features
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 Problems facing Mobile IP
• Routing inefficiencies
– Asymmetry in routing: Triangle routing
– Route optimization requires changes in the
correspondent nodes that will take a long time
to deploy

• Security issues
– Firewalls
Ø Blocks all classes of incoming packets that do not
meet specified criteria
Ø It presents difficulties for mobile nodes wishing to
communicate with other nodes within their home
enterprise networks

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 Problems facing Mobile IP (cont)
• Security issues
– Ingress filtering
Ø Many border router discard packets coming from
within the enterprise if the packets do not contain a
source IP address configured for one of the
enterprise’s internal network
Ø Mobile node would otherwise use their home address
as the source IP address of the packets they transmit
Ø Possible solution: tunneling outgoing packets from
the care-of address (Q: where is the target for the
tunneled packets from the mobile node? Home
agent?)

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