AAA and Network Security for Mobile Access: Radius, Diameter, EAP, PKI and IP Mobility

5.2. Shortcomings of Mobile IP Base Specification

Mobile IP specification has developed over many years of evolution. The IETF RFCs have been revised several times to cover issues that have been pointed out for Mobile IP operation. Furthermore, the specification for IPv4 is different from the specification for IPv6. We do not cover Mobile IPv6 specification in this text and refer the reader to the end of this chapter for more references on Mobile IPv6. Also, as mentioned above, the security procedures for Mobile IP may require interaction with AAA servers. The support for this interaction is being standardized outside the scope of Mobile IP base specification as will be described in Chapter 8.

Issues related to full mobility support are many and complicated and cannot be covered in a small text such as this. To name a few things that we do not cover in this chapter, we would mention interaction of mobile and VPN gateways, traversal of Mobile IP traffic through network address translation boxes and network mobility and refer the user to the end of the chapter and the related IETF work in the area.

In the remainder of this section we will discuss many Mobile IP issues such as address, HA and key bootstrapping. We also briefly discuss the performance issues for Mobile IP, when handover latency can be an issue and cover the fast handover methods that have been suggested to alleviate these problems. In the rest of this chapter we describe some protocols that are complementary to Mobile ...