Mechanisms of Mobile IP in delivering packets and its trends for changing from IPv4 to IPv6

Mobile IP was produced by the IP Routing for Wireless/Mobile Hosts working group of the IETF, approved by the Internet Engineering Steering Group (IESG) in June 1996 and published as a proposed standard in November 1996. It gave solutions to solve problems that a mobility device obtains when moving from one link to another. The movement makes the network-prefix routing fail in delivering packets because the mobile node´s new network-prefix is no longer equal the network-prefix assigned to its current link. This paper describes mechanisms used to deliver IP packets to mobile nodes which allow them to maintain all ongoing communications while changing links. Then, mobile IPv6´s mechanisms on MPLS network are briefly presented as solutions for mobility devices in the future. Finally, the conclusion gives the approach to do research on mobile IP in the trends of making it scalable, secure and adaptive with the future network, especially in the period of changing from IPv4 to IPv6.