Exploring network mobility in IPv6 environments: issues and lessons learnt

The unprecedented growth of the Internet in the past few years has revealed problems of management and scalability, which have been aggravated by an increasing need for group communications and by the proliferation of wireless mobile terminals. These have led to three of the main challenges of the present Internet: support for mobility (terminal mobility as well as network mobility), multicast communication and IPv6 deployment. This paper describes the work carried out in the context of a project developed at the Laboratory of Communications and Telematics of the University of Coimbra, which aims at implementing and evaluating network mobility´ solutions. The prototype of a mobile network developed in the scope of the project explores the use of mobile routers in conjunction with the IPv6 protocol. The paper reports the implementation of a mobile network, for Linux and FreeBSD environments, and the findings relating to some of the present limitations of network mobility scenarios, of which the routing overhead is the most important.