IP Mobile

The evolution of technology has led to the emergence of new types of machines. These computers, known as deportables, enable users to work from different locations. You no longer need to be in your office, in front of your workstation, to edit a text or draw a diagram. These computers have enough autonomy and computing power to meet today's needs. Laptops can be used to work on locally stored data, but their users increasingly need to be able to communicate with their companies or other collaborators while on the move. Until now, these connections were made when the laptop was in a location equipped, for example, with a network connection or a telephone socket. The laptop was connected to this network or telephone socket, enabling it to communicate with its destination(s). These were known as mobile computers. But this type of communication is only possible when the laptop is in an equipped room. Communications are stopped as soon as the mobile computer is disconnected from the network.

The arrival of new data transmission technologies on wireless networks such as 802.11, GPRS and UMTS means that laptops are no longer simply nomadic machines. Today, it's possible for a laptop to communicate even while on the move. We no longer speak of nomadic computers, but of mobile computers.

The Internet craze has had at least one advantage: it has led to the recognition of its IP protocol as a network communications standard. The majority of existing applications are developed and designed to use this protocol. Indeed, it enables a machine to be connected to its local network, but also to communicate with any other machine on the Internet. In this context of communicating computing, it was natural to envisage the use of mobile computers on the Internet. The aim is to enable these mobile computers to use the Internet to communicate with other machines, whether fixed or mobile. As the IP protocol was conceived long before the emergence of these new technologies, its functionalities could not take account of this new type of computer. It was therefore necessary to enhance the protocol to support mobility. A new protocol was born: IP Mobile. The aim of this protocol is to hide the mobility of a piece of equipment from its correspondents on the rest of the Internet.

A number of working groups (mobile IP – IETF, 3GPP, 3G.IP) see this protocol as a way of enabling mobile terminals to stay connected to the Internet, even when they're on the move. In particular, mobile operators need this type of protocol to ensure continuity of Internet connectivity when an IP mobile terminal moves from one operator to another, while the terminal is communicating with other IP equipment. Mobile IP is defined according to several standards. The first standard was RFC 2002, defined...