Network-based mobility and Host Identity Protocol

The current use of IP address in network application session identification cannot preserve the session when the IP address changes. Host Identity Protocol (HIP), which is an identity-location separation protocol, provides a better framework to build solutions for mobility, multihoming, and security by adding a host identity layer on top of the IP layer. Yet modifying the IP protocol stack and adding mobility as well as other solutions to all the hosts can be impractical to deploy and interoperate with existing IP hosts. This paper proposes a network-based HIP service as well as mobility solution at HIP layer to all mobile hosts. The network-based service includes tracking mobile hosts, assigning network prefix per host identifier, securely updating the binding of mobile hosts, and providing a HIP proxy function to ensure the delivery of the same IP prefix to the mobile host during handover in the same network domain. Better handover performance in terms of handover latency and signaling overheard is achieved, when compared with proxy mobile IP or existing purely HIP-based mobility protocol.