Due to the proliferation of mobile devices connected to the Internet, implementing a secure and practical Mobile IP has become an important goal. A mobile IP can not work properly without authentication between the mobile node (MN), the home agent (HA) and the foreign agent (FA). In this paper, we propose a practical Mobile IP authentication protocol that uses public key cryptography only during the initial authentication. The proposed scheme is compatible with the conventional Mobile IP protocol and provides scalability against the number of MN's. We also show that the proposed protocol offers secure operation.

A packet diversity scheme is introduced to increase uplink channel efficiency in a wireless network where forward error correction is used. The packet diversity allows neighbor base stations to receive uplink packets from a mobile terminal in order to increase the efficiency of the uplink channel. By allowing multiple base stations to receive the same packets, we can improve the error correction capability in an uplink channel. By incorporating the packet diversity we can reduce the parity overhead of each packet for a given tolerable loss probability, which improves the link efficiency.

In this letter, we propose a hybrid authentication algorithm to alleviate the latent security problems of mobile multi-hop networks. The proposed scheme uses centralized authentication when a node first joins the network, and uses distributed authentication for the hop-by-hop authentication among multi-hop nodes. We also analyze performance of the proposed scheme.