Delay sensitive low-cost security mechanism for mobile IP

With the advances in the processing capabilities of wireless devices such as smart phones and laptops, the demand for staying connected to the Internet has steadily increased. This demand is strengthened further by the introduction of Internet connectivity within the airplanes. Mobile IP is one of the protocols that have been proposed to support user/network mobility. Mobile IP introduces new entities such as home agent and foreign agent to facilitate user/network mobility. As the user/network (mobile client) move from one network to another all their connections need to be handed off from one mobile agent to another to maintain seamless connectivity. While effective handoff mechanism by itself is an active research field, security combined with effective handoff introduces new challenges. While these security mechanisms help in maintaining security and privacy of the user, they introduce additional processing delay thereby affecting the performance. In this paper, the authors propose a novel low cost security mechanism that ensures the security of the communication. It will be shown that the proposed mechanism will secure mobile node communication without affecting the performance. While the proposed architecture requires the mobility agents to cache additional information, the analysis carried out by the authors indicates that the additional cost is compensated by the added security for the communication between the mobile client and the mobility agents.