Mobile IP

Components/Entities of Mobile IP:

Mobile IP is the
extension of
traditional
Network Layer
protocol viz. IP,
typically meant
for packet
delivery
between static
nodes, to
facilitate
communication
to/from mobile
nodes changing
their points of
attachment
across the
traditional
TCP/IP Internet
from time to
time.
Tunnelling and Encapsulation
Tunnelling
In the physical world, tunnelling is a way to cross terrain or boundaries that could not normally be
crossed. Similarly, in networking, tunnelling is a method for transporting data across a network using
protocols that are not supported by that network.

The tunnel represents a single-hop virtual conduit over which datagrams are forwarded across an
arbitrary internetwork, with the details of the original datagram temporarily hidden by a mechanism
called encapsulation.

In Mobile IP, the entry-point of the tunnel is the Home Agent, which does the encapsulation. The exit-
point of the tunnel depends on what sort of Care-of Address (COA) is being used:

Foreign Agent Care-of Address: The Foreign Agent is the exit-point of the tunnel. It receives
encapsulated packets from the Home Agent, decapsulates them and then delivers them to the Mobile
Node. This is generally done using layer two, because the Mobile Node and Foreign Agent are on the
same local network, and of course, the Mobile Node does not have its own IP address on that network
(instead it is using that of the foreign agent).

Co-located Care-of Address: The Mobile Node itself is the exit-point of the tunnel and simply
decapsulates the received packets.

Packets entering a tunnel are forwarded inside the tunnel and leave the tunnel unchanged.

Encapsulation:
Data travelling over a network is divided into packets. A typical packet has two parts: the header,
which indicates, along with some other details, the packet's source and destination address and which
protocol it uses, and the payload, which is the packet's actual content.

Encapsulation is the mechanism of taking an original packet in its entirety and putting it into the
payload part of a new packet with a new header, possibly making a modification or an extension to
the original header.

The reverse operation, i.e., taking a packet out of the payload part of another packet, is called
decapsulation.
Encapsulation and decapsulation are the operations typically performed when a packet is transferred
from a higher protocol layer to a lower layer, and from a lower to a higher layer respectively. In Mobile
IP, these operations are performed within the same layer, that is to say the Network Layer (Layer 3).

Types of Encapsulation:
Three types of encapsulation are specified for Mobile IP:

IP-in-IP Encapsulation: Required to be supported. A full IP header is added to the original IP packet.
The original header is kept unchanged except the TTL field which is decremented by 1 to show that
the whole tunnel is considered only a single hop from the original packet’s point of view. The outer
header contains HA address as source and Care-of Address as destination.

Minimal Encapsulation: Optional. Incurs less overhead than the IP-in-IP encapsulation as some
redundant or unnecessary fields are discarded from the original header. The outer header contains
HA address as source and Care-of Address as destination as usual.
Generic Routing Encapsulation (GRE): Optional. Allows packets of one protocol suite to be
encapsulated by another protocol suite. An additional intermediate header, called the GRE header, is
prepended to the original packet of the first protocol and together they form the payload of the new
packet of the second protocol. The outer header contains HA address as source and Care-of Address
as destination as usual.

Significance of encapsulation:
Encapsulation helps in two ways:

i. It facilitates reachability by an abstract intermediate destination viz. the COA.

ii. It overcomes the barrier posed by a dissimilar protocol

A note on the necessity of encapsulation

All packets use networking protocols — standardized ways of formatting data — to get to their destinations.
However, not all networks support all protocols. Imagine a company wants to set up a wide area network (WAN)
connecting Office A and Office B. The company uses the IPv6 protocol, which is the latest version of the Internet
Protocol (IP), but there is a network between Office A and Office B that only supports IPv4. By encapsulating
their IPv6 packets inside IPv4 packets, the company can continue to use IPv6 while still sending data directly
between the offices.
The process of packet delivery in Mobile IP:
Requirements/Challenges of Mobile IP:
 Mobile Ad-hoc Network (MANET)
Traditional packet routing protocols for wired networks cannot be used in MANET

As we know, the purpose of routing is to find the best path between the source and the destination
for forwarding packets in any store-and-forward network. In a traditional network, routing is a
relatively easy task because the routes to nodes can be uniquely and efficiently identified based on
the subnet structure encoded in IP. In a MANET, the nodes making up a route may themselves move
or shut down due to low battery energy, in the process making the knowledge about routes at various
nodes to quickly become obsolete. It is therefore necessary to find a possible new route each time a
node needs to transmit a message, making routing an expensive and difficult task. Because of this,
traditional routing protocols would not be suitable in a mobile ad-hoc network.

Routing in MANETs vs. Routing in Traditional Wired Networks:

• In a MANET, each node acts as a router, whereas ordinary nodes in a traditional wired network do
not participate in routing the packets.

• In a MANET, the topology is dynamic because of the mobility of the nodes, but it is static in the case
of traditional networks. Thus, the routing tables in a MANET quickly become obsolete, making the
routing process complicated.

• In the simple IP-based addressing scheme deployed in wired networks, the IP address encapsulated
in the subnet structure does not work because of node mobility.

A Classification of Unicast MANET Routing Protocols:

Applications of MANET:
Characteristics of MANET: