Mobile IP Address Efficiency

In future wireless networks, Mobile IP will be widely deployed as a general mobility protocol. Currently, in the protocol each mobile node (MN) should have one public home address to identify itself when it is away from home. Unlike the stationary host, the MN cannot simply use private addresses when NAT (Network Address Translation) is enabled. How to assign public addresses among mobile nodes is important to save the already limited IPv4 addresses. Even though Mobile IPv6 can provide a large address space, when communicating with IPv4 based hosts, the MN still needs to use one public IPv4 address. Protocol translation can map between IPv6 and IPv4 addresses; however, it is a NAT-based approach and breaks end-to end communications. From a new perspective, we propose an address-sharing mechanism that allows a large number of MNs to share only one IPv4 public address while avoiding most of the drawbacks of NAT