Mobile IP in the Current and Future Internet
monday, may 20, 9.00-12.45

Mobility is a fact of modern life. As mobile computing devices such as laptops and PDAs become more important in business and personal life, and as wireless networking products and services continue to proliferate, the desire to compute and to connect to the network "anytime, anywhere" is natural. However, the wide variety of such devices and networking technologies creates an incompatible array of "closed" solutions.

Mobile IP is a technology defined and standardized by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), the principal protocol standards development organization for the Internet, to allow mobile devices to transparently move about and be connected to the Internet in an open, compatible way. Devices using Mobile IP use a single IP address and are able to participate fully in the Internet as if they were in their home network, no matter where they connect to the Internet. Since Mobile IP operates at the IP layer, it is compatible with any lower networking layer that supports IP; it thus allows mobile computers not only to move about from place to place, but also to move transparently between differing lower layer technologies such as different types of wired or wireless networking services.

In this tutorial, we will examine the design and operation of Mobile IP, from the view of how the protocol operates and the capabilities that the protocol provides to mobile users in the Internet. After a summary of the fundamental problems and design challenges addressed by Mobile IP, we will discuss the operation of Mobile IP in the current Internet (using IP Version 4, or IPv4) and in the new version of IP (IP Version 6, or IPv6) designed to replace IPv4 to provide growth potential and support for new capabilities for the future Internet.

Dave B. Johnson

Rice University,
Department of Computer Science
6100 Main Street
MS 132 Houston
TX 77005-1892 USA

David B. Johnson is an Associate Professor of Computer Science and Electrical and Computer Engineering at Rice University, and is a member of Rice's Computer Systems Laboratory and Center for Multimedia Communication. Prior to joining the faculty at Rice in 2000, he was an Associate Professor of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University, where he had been on the faculty for eight years. He received the Ph.D. degree in computer science in 1990 from Rice University.

Professor Johnson is leading the Monarch Project at Rice University (previously at Carnegie Mellon University), developing adaptive networking protocols and architectures to allow truly seamless wireless and mobile networking. Related to this research, he has also been very active in the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), were he was one of the main designers of the IETF Mobile IP protocol for IPv4 and has been the primary designer of Mobile IP for IPv6. Professor Johnson has been Technical Program Co-Chair for MobiCom'97 and MobiHoc 2002, and has served as a member of the Technical Program Committee for over 25 international conferences and workshops. He is an editor for the journals Mobile Networks and Applications (MONET), Wireless Networks (WINET), IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking (ToN), Mobile Computing and Communications Review (MC2R), and IEEE Pervasive Computing. He is also an Executive Committee member and the Treasurer for SIGMOBILE, the ACM Special Interest Group on Mobility of Systems, Users, Data, and Computing. He is a member of the ACM, IEEE, IEEE Computer Society, IEEE Communications Society, USENIX, Sigma Xi, and the Internet Society.