An Internet infrastructure for cellular CDMA networks using mobile IP

The CDMA community, under the umbrella of the 3rd Generation Partnership Project 2, has embarked on a standardization effort for wireless data based on mobile IP. Important issues addressed include the link layer interface to a mobile IP foreign agent; how link-layer mobility interacts with IP-layer mobility; how virtual private network services will be supported; and how to provide authentication, authorization, and accounting in a cellular mobile IP environment. Members of 3GPP2 are also active in the Internet Engineering Task Force's mobile IP, ROAMOPS, and AAA working groups. Based on our experiences in this effort, this article gives an overview of the issues we have encountered in standardizing a mobile IP-based network architecture in a cellular telephony environment, including current points of contention, and gives a summary of the current state of the standards.