MAT: An End-to-End Mobile Communication Architecture with Seamless IP Handoff Support for the Next Generation Internet

The technological advancement in the area of handheld mobile devices has resulted in a movement towards total mobility. Real-time applications are demanding such a flexible mobility support that would not interact adversely with the existing protocols, especially with Quality of Service (QoS) and security mechanisms. We believe that this could be achieved by providing mobility services through the mobile nodes themselves rather than via proxies. This paper proposes an end-to-end mobile communication architecture, called Mobile IP with Address Translation (MAT). MAT does not require any modification in the core network. To realize mobility we use address translation within host-nodes at the IP layer. We describe MAT architecture and show its mobility capability by prototype implementation and evaluation. Preliminary results show that MAT is fully compatible and works fine in both IPv4 and IPv6 environment. We also compare its features with Mobile IPv4 (MIP), Mobile IPv6 (MIPv6) and Location Independent Network Architecture (LIN6) protocols. Furthermore we propose a handoff technique based on MAT which helps to reduce service disruption interval significantly.