Mobility support using the mobile port mapping

As wireless communication infrastructures such as 3G, WIFI and WIMAX networks are widely deployed, mobile IP communications are expected to grow rapidly. Although there are many mobile IP communication solutions such as GPRS Tunneling Protocol, Mobile IP and so on, they are still unable to provide large-scale mobile communication services in IPv4 networks because of the exhaustion of IPv4 addresses. In this paper, we present an Identifier/Locator split technique called the Mobile Port Mapping (MPM) which supports steady connections at the Transport layer when handover occurs. A MPM based SIP architecture (MPM-SIP) is proposed, in which part ports of a global IPv4 address is allocated to a particular mobile terminal instead of the total IPv4 address. MPM-SIP not only avoids the exhaustion of global IPv4 Addresses, but also provides backward compatibility to correspondence nodes. The architecture is verified and the performance is tested, which demonstrates that it is a promising technique to provide transparent mobility in IPv4 networks.