Vertical Handover Support for Multimode Mobile Terminal using Multi-Homed MIPv4

Basic mobile IPv4 (MIPv4) operation constraints applications bound to the same home address (HoA) to use the same physical interface because traffic is only tunneled towards a single care-of-address (CoA) by the home agent (HA). This prevents different applications from using different physical interfaces. Solutions to address this problem have been proposed that require configuration of filters in the HA to tunnel traffic towards different CoAs but these require modifications to the network, and additional signaling between the mobile terminal (MT) and the network. This paper describes a solution to support multimode operation using MIPv4 with no changes to the network, as well as the multimode MT architecture supporting such MIPv4 operation.