Managing Private and Global IP Addresses in Mobile Networks

Abstract

The Internet Protocol (IP) plays an important role of the mobile network. As the need of connecting to the Internet increases enormously, the address starvation problem for the IP version 4 (IPv4) is introduced. Many companies and institutes thus use private IP addresses to overcome the problem. However, the design of Mobile IP does not support private IP addresses. In order to deal with this problem, several approaches were proposed to support private IP addresses and NAT function in mobile IP. Nevertheless, the approaches may not have enough global IP addresses in home network and then lead to erroneous routing. In this paper, an approach to managing private and global IP addresses is described. When the home agent does not have any available global IP address for a mobile node, our approach will automatically obtain a global IP address from supported foreign agents.