Mobile Inter-networking with IPv6 : Concepts, Principles and Practices

19

Enterprise IP Mobility

Computers in the future may weigh no more than 1.5 tons.    –Popular Mechanics, forecasting the relentless march of science, 1949

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Blackberry 5810, weighing 4.7 ounces

19.1 INTRODUCTION

Remote access to enterprise network resources has always been a popular application. Even before the dawn of WLAN, roaming employees used the Plain Old Telephone Service (POTS) for dial-up access to corporate data. With WLAN, mobility across enterprise campus networks has become feasible. Roaming users inside an enterprise WLAN network can maintain their application sessions in spite of mobility. As a next step, such enterprise users can also move from WLAN to Wireless WAN and still maintain their sessions. In this chapter, we will discuss specific characteristics of enterprise networks and how mobility solutions could be designed in such environments.

The enterprise networks present some unique challenges to mobile networking. First, security is of paramount importance for fairly obvious reasons. This implies that any access must be authorized and subsequently kept confidential. When mobility is involved, this criterion must continue to be met. Second, a huge majority of these networks are IPv4 networks. So, mobility solutions must work with IPv4. Third, the emerging peer-peer ...