Bootstrapping mobile IPv6 using EAP

Mobile IPv6 is the protocol defined by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) to enable nodes to roam between IP subnets. Its specification requires the mobile node to be configured with at least a Home prefix to discover a home agent address, a home address and the cryptographic materials needed to protect mobile IPv6 signaling. In a real deployment perspective, manual configuration is cumbersome and a dynamic bootstrapping solution is needed. This is referred to as the mobile IPv6 bootstrapping problem. This paper describes a solution where mobility and network access services are provided by the same entity. Our idea is to use the AAA infrastructure so the authorization and configuration of the mobility service are both performed during the network access authentication phase. Our solution is based on the extensible authentication protocol (EAP) that usually serves to authenticate users. We solve the bootstrapping problem by using existing extensions of some EAP authentication methods to carry mobile IPv6 parameters from the home domain to the mobile node. This solution has been implemented in Telecom Italia laboratory.