Accessibility wherever you are with Mobile IPv6

Freedom to Travel

Article from ADMIN 14/2013

By Eric Amberg

IPv6 includes Mobile IPv6, a new standard for communication with mobile devices, which ensures permanent accessibility regardless of your current location. In this article, we provide an overview of Mobile IPv6 functionality.

Imagine that you are working in your home office with your tablet, which is connected to your home's wireless network. You leave the house for the airport, and while you're traveling in a taxi, the tablet uses LTE to connect with your provider, so you can check your home portal to see whether the heating was turned off. At the airport, the mobile device automatically connects to the public WiFi hotspot, on which you can check the time of departure and check in to your flight. While all this happened, you were connected all the time to your corporate network via a secure tunnel.

This scenario might sound like science fiction, but it is closer than you think. Mobile IPv6 (MIPv6) makes it possible to maintain accessibility on any network with the same address and to switch networks without interrupting connections. The prerequisite for such a setup is an IPv6 infrastructure.

The Roaming Issue

When a connection is established between two nodes, it is usually based on the IP addresses of the communication partners. If one partner changes networks, it inevitably receives a new IP address. As a consequence, the connection is dropped and must be reestablished. In the future, however, the connection between two communication partners will be maintained as a matter of course, despite a changing network connection. This principle is called roaming (Figure 1).

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