Enabling Mobility in IPv6 Networks

Abstract

With the explosive growth in Internet usage over the last decade, the need for a larger address space is unavoidable, since all the addresses in IPv4 are nearly fully occupied. IPv6 (Deering & Hinden, 1998), with 128-bit addresses compared to IPv4 with 32-bit addresses and other advantages (like auto-configuration and IP mobility), can overcome many of the problems that IPv4 had before. One of the requirements for the modern Internet is IP mobility support. In IPv4, a special router is needed to act as a foreign agent in the visited/foreign network and the need of a network element in the home network known as a home agent for a mobile host. IPv6 does away with the need for the foreign agent and operates in any location without any special support from a local router. Route optimization is inherent in IPv6, and this feature eliminates the triangle-routing (routing through the home agent) problem that exists in IPv4. IPv6 enjoys many network optimizations that are already built in within IPv6.