Application of mobile IP to tactical mobile internetworking

The mobile internetworking protocol or mobile IP, proposed in the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), does not consider the requirements of tactical military networks, which are predominantly radio based and “on the move” with minimal fixed infrastructure. We present a tactical mobile IP solution for the military architecture, specifically the radio access point (RAP) network, with a focus on providing mobility and fault tolerance. Our approach, in this work, is on improving survivability by moving mobility agents to higher, less mobile and more fault tolerant echelons in the hierarchy. As a baseline approach, we propose a tactical mobile IP solution based on the mobile IP protocol proposed in the IETF using Class C address assignment. It is observed that an architecture with multiple Class C address assignment supports basic mobile IP operation without any modification. We propose the use of classless inter-domain routing (CIDR) to accommodate a large number of Internet addresses. It is shown that other address assignment schemes can also be applied to the military architecture without any modification to the mobile IP. Three route optimization schemes are also described to improve the performance of datagram routing to mobile nodes