Mobility Management using the IP Protocol

Time critical applications, such as VoIP and video conferencing require Internet connectivity all of the time for better performance. Moreover, in case of vehicular networks, it is very common for mobile devices to move from one network to another. In such scenarios the sudden changes in the network connectivity may cause problems, which affects the data transmission rate. The movement of a mobile node from one network to another is also a challenge for the routers to maintain the routing information as well as to forward the data to the corresponding node. In all of the aforementioned scenarios, the switching between the networks with minimum latency improves the performance, i.e. in terms of mobility and availability of the network. The Mobile IP protocol serves the purpose of seamless handover of mobile devices from one network to another. A mobile node maintains its permanent IP address using the Mobile IP protocol while moving to a foreign network. When a mobile node establishes the connection with the foreign network the data packets transmitted from the home network are redirected to the foreign network. The Mobile IP protocol establishes a tunnel between the home network and the foreign network. The process of tunneling continues until the mobile node moves back to the home network or when the foreign network advertises the new IP address of the mobile node. With the increasing number of wireless devices the mobility is the key challenge. The devices with multiple interfaces such as mobile phone which uses 4G as well as WiFi, the urge for the availability of the Internet is also high. This paper provides a deep discussion about the Mobile IP protocol and its implementation. A network scenario is proposed with the configuration of the Mobile IP. According to the obtained results of the simulations, the Mobile IP protocol increases the availability of the network connection as well as it achieves the larger throughput when compared with the scenario without using the Mobile IP.