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

Part V

Emerging Topics in IP Mobility

The development of Mobile IPv6 is by no means complete. It has already inspired many related research efforts and will inspire many more as time goes on. Like IPv6, Mobile IPv6 is engineered for global deployment, but this broad applicability in itself introduces numerous different requirements that arise from various governmental regulations, interactions with new technologies, and the continued evolution of the Internet itself. We expect that there will be a continual push towards better performance in order to support more high-speed applications. There are likely to be other enhancements to improve battery life and bandwidth utilization and to facilitate integration with many other preexisting application scenarios.

In this part of the book, we introduce some interesting emerging topics that are part of the continuing evolution of Mobile IPv6. While Mobile IPv6 does solve the mobility management problem at the network layer, there are many other layers involved, and the solutions required for a complete system are prompting the further evolution of Mobile IPv6 along interesting new lines. For instance, Mobile IPv6 essentially discloses the home IP address of the mobile node. In fact, IP tunneling itself discloses this address, so that is nothing new, and this has been accepted behavior in the Internet since the beginning. But now, VoIP ...