IP Address Management with FaultTolerant in Mobile IP Networks

Abstract

The Internet Protocol (IP) plays an important role of wireless mobile networks. As the need of connecting to the Internet increases enormously, the address starvation problem for the IP version 4 (IPv4) has appeared gradually. Many companies and institutes thus use private IP addresses to conquer the problem. However, private IP addresses are not currently supported in mobile IP networks. Several approaches were proposed to support private IP addresses using the Network Address Translator (NAT) function with mobile IP. The approaches may lead to erroneous routing if no available IP address exists in home network. This paper presents an mechanism that can help the home agent to obtain a global IP address from supported foreign agents when the home agent cannot provide a global IP address. The paper also describes fault-tolerant techniques to strengthen the operation of the vital agents in the mobile network. When agents fail, redundant agents can take over rapidly and resume normal operation.