Mobile IP with Location Registers (MIP-LR)
draft-jain-miplr-01

Abstract

This document is intended only to provide information to the Internet community. The Mobile IP (MIP) protocol for IP version 4 provides continuous Internet connectivity to mobile hosts, without requiring any changes to existing routers and higher-layer applications. This document describes an alternative protocol, Mobile IP with Location Registers (MIP-LR), where the sender first queries a database, called a Location Register, to obtain the recipients current location. MIP-LR is designed for operation in tactical military environments, enterprise environments or within logical administrative domains, as it requires a sending host to be aware which hosts implement the MIP-LR protocol. MIP-LR gives up the transparency of MIP for several benefits in the areas of survivability, performance and interoperability. MIP-LR improves survivability for situations where the mobile's home network is particularly vulnerable (e.g. in the forward area of a battlefield), by allowing location registers to be placed and replicated outside the home network. This document describes how replicated location registers can be managed by Translation Server or Quorum schemes. In terms of performance, MIP-LR avoids triangle routing and tunneling, and reduces the load on the home network as well as the home agents. MIP-LR provides improved interoperability with protocols such as RSVP for providing QoS guarantees. Finally, MIP-LR is interoperable with MIP, such that hosts which implement only MIP can continue to operate as expected (provided the provisions required by MIP, such as Home and Foreign Agents, are appropriately provided) without gaining any of the benefits of MIP-LR. We have developed a working version of the MIP-LR protocol running on Linux hosts.

Authors

Ravi Jain
Thomas Raleigh
Michael Bereschinsky
Charles J. Graff

(Note: The e-mail addresses provided for the authors of this Internet-Draft may no longer be valid.)