Mobile IP and virtual private networks

With a growing number of portable computing devices like laptops and personal digital assistants (PDA), the need for seamless connectivity to the global Internet is driving the acceptance of different mobility solutions. Mobile IP is one of the widely accepted mobility solutions for mobile nodes. Though mobile IP caters the seamless connectivity requirements of the mobile nodes, the issues regarding quality of service (QoS) and security remains unsolved. Most of the corporate users like to have seamless connectivity along with security and QoS while they are roaming in the foreign network. The issues related to security and QoS becomes more complicated when dealing with a network on the move (mobile network). A virtual private network (VPN) can be used as an alternative mobility solution to cater the security and QoS in addition to mobility. In the current research work, we evaluate the QoS provided by these alternative mobility solutions as compared to the traditional mobile IP.