Virtual ID: A Technique for Mobility, Multi-Homing, and Location Privacy in Next Generation Wireless Networks

Cellular networking standards organizations such as the 3^rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) are currently developing System Architecture Evolution (SAE) as their core network architecture. SAE is all-IP based. However, IP-based networks face several known issues, such as mobility, multi-homing, location privacy, path preference, etc. Mobile IP (MIP) and its variants, such as Mobile IPv6 (MIPv6), Hierarchical MIP, and Proxy MIP, have been developed primarily to alleviate the mobility problem. These variation and extensions, however, still do not provide many of the features required in Next Generation Wireless Networks (NGWN). The limitations are especially due to the overloading of IP addresses as both node identity and locator. In this paper, we propose an extension to MIPv6 called Virtual ID. This concept applies the ID/Locator split idea into a Mobile IPv6 environment. Virtual ID and its extensions provide many features that would be desired in the NGWN. Since our proposed scheme is based on the standard MIPv6 and Proxy MIPv6, the scheme is fully compatible with the legacy MIPv6.