Mobile ip in a mpls-enabled ip network

An increasingly mobile workforce is driving the need for mobile nodes to be connected to the global Internet. While Mobile IP provides for IP connectivity between the mobile node and a correspondent node, it offers no implicit support for security and QoS provisioning. The extension of Mobile IP to account for the mobility of entire networks leads to scalability issues related to the various associated encapsulation overheads. With an increasing emphasis on the mobility of entire networks as compared to that of an individual node, the need for explicit QoS support and security provisioning within the framework of Mobile IP is needed for the practical deployment of a mobility solution within a corporate network. In this research, a set of enhancements based upon a mathematical formulation of the mobility and QoS implementations were proposed in order to improve the performance of traditional Mobile IP with respect to reduced registration times, forwarding of datagrams between the Home Network (HN) and the Mobile Router (MR), and support for QoS. The deployment of a secure mobility solution was envisioned by considering the mobility problem from a mobile VPN perspective. A Dynamic Multipoint VPN ( DMVPN) configuration was proposed to reduce the configuration required on the MR for (a) supporting a preset IPSec profile and (b) to employ a multipoint GRE tunneling mechanism to enable the creation of dynamic tunnels between different MRs. The usage of a RFC 2547 based VPN was proposed to separate the traffic profiles from different Mobile Networks (MNs) to bolster the security features of traditional Mobile IP. While an evaluation of a Multipoint GRE (mGRE) based mobile RFC 2547 VPN in the SRL was not possible due to equipment restrictions, simulations results revealed comparable end-to-end performance but deteriorating scalability with an increasing number of supported MRs for the MPLS over GRE (MoGRE) based mobility solution as for those due to the usage of traditional Mobile IP. The primary bottleneck in the deployment of a MoGRE based mobile VPN in terms of CPU/memory usage and the time for commissioning a MR was identified to be due to the usage of BGP for distributing vpnv4 information between the MR and the HA. By considering the mobility problem at Layer 2, several scalability issues related to the deployment of a Layer 3 mobile VPN were circumvented. An alternative mobility solution based on Layer 2 connectivity was proposed and a test network was configured in the SRL to evaluate the deployment of an L2TPv3 based Mobile Layer 2 VPN (mL2VPN). Due to the lack of support for sequencing within the implementation of L2TPv3 on the routers in the test network, considerable number of dropped calls (and dropped data packets) was observed with the usage of an mL2VPN. However, the end-to-end statistics reveal performance of real-time and best-effort traffic streams due to an mL2VPN to be comparable to those obtained from traditional Mobile IP.