This letter proposes a new mechanism for network configuration on a mobile device that provides Point of Attachment (PoA) specific information using IEEE 802.21 and DHCP before moving to a new PoA. This allows the mobile device to prepare for intelligent handover decision either stateless address configuration or stateful address configuration when entering an IPv6 network. It allows the mobile device to reduce time delay for IP address configuration in the new PoA. Implementation and evaluation results show that the proposed mechanism can be an acceptable network configuration mechanism for providing seamless television watching in IPv6 mobile networks, even when in motion.

This letter proposes a new fast network configuration scheme that realizes an IP interface that allows users to view Internet Protocol TV (IPTV) in IPv6 networks more quickly than is possible with the current configuration procedure. The new scheme, a hybrid combination of IPv6, address information, and non-IP information, especially the Domain Name Service, is newly designed based on a technical analysis. The evaluation results show that the proposed scheme is acceptable for real-time television watching in IPv6 networks, even when in motion.

Internet Virtual Private Networks (VPNs) across geographically distributed users' networks are ideal for ad-hoc group activities, such as online gaming, over the Internet. However, users find it difficult to determine and set the configurations of the VPN routers and hosts rapidly enough for ad-hoc usage, due to the need for consistency of such configurations over the users' networks. Moreover, the number of operators is insufficient to help all users. Hence, the automatic determination and setting of such configurations from the management server is desirable. Existing auto-configuration methods are insufficient for ad-hoc usage because they cannot rapidly determine and set the hosts' configurations to be consistent with the VPN and user's network they are joining. To enable ad-hoc creation of and joining to a VPN by the users themselves, we propose a new method that utilizes the Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP), which can automatically set the configurations of many existing hosts. The DHCP server's and relay agents' configurations are automatically determined and set by the VPN management server, based on the user request, so that the hosts can be auto-configured to be consistent with the VPN and the user's network they are joining, from the DHCP server via the autoconfigured DHCP relay agents. To evaluate the time overhead of our proposed method, we implemented a test bed, including 10 VPN routers, a VPN management server, and a DHCP server. In this evaluation, the DHCP server is auto-configured for each new VPN in less than 1 second, and the DHCP relay agents on the VPN routers are auto-configured in less than 5 percent of the total time for configuring the VPN routers, regardless of the total number of the VPN routers in a VPN. These results show that the proposed method can auto-configure the VPN routers and hosts simultaneously with the DHCP, while ensuring sufficient rapidity of the entire auto-configuration operation for ad-hoc usage.

Tunneling is commonly used in several transition mechanisms. Some of the mechanisms discover the tunnel endpoint automatically by their own means. This paper describes several tunnel discovery mechanisms for IPv6 traversal beyond IPv4 legacy networks and suggests a new mechanism by which the DHCPv4 server can automatically provide configuration information about IPv6-in-IPv4 tunnel. Dual stack nodes attached to IPv4 network can communicate with other IPv6 networks by this mechanism beyond IPv4 networks without user intervention. Implementations have shown that the proposed mechanism can be a convenient and valuable tunnel discovery mechanism in some cases.

This letter describes the current mechanism for IP address configuration in the wireless Internet and examines its drawbacks, and suggests a new mechanism of address configuration which provides a reduced message exchange for address configuration in the wireless Internet over the current 4-way message exchange when performing address configuration through DHCP. Analytic performance evaluation and comparison have shown that the proposed mechanism is faster in terms of delay than the existing mechanism including reduced packet loss when in motion.

This paper presents the basic design and principles of an FQDN-based Internet Architecture, where a host is identified in the Internet only by its FQDN (Fully Qualified Domain Name). The address shortage problem for the IPv4 paradigm has been marginally solved by introducing private addresses within the intranet and also by DHCP for public Internet access services. These two approaches have been independently developed. Considering more elaborate peer-to-peer communications such as voice over IP (VoIP) in the future Internet, the shortage of address space will become a serious problem for a call or session to be established. To alleviate this, this paper proposes an FQDN-based Internet architecture, assuming that a global endpoint identifier (EID) in the network is FQDN instead of an IP address. Since a countably infinite number of addresses can be logically produced by FQDN, this system resolves the address shortage problem assuming a caller uses the FQDN of the called terminal or host. This requires a dynamic address loading system from the FQDN of the called terminal into one of the available public IP addresses. After proposing a possible address loading system, some mathematical results on the required number of public addresses for VoIP traffic, the address space size of the derived Internet, etc. are also presented.

In the IETF, discussions on the authentication method of the Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP) message are active and several methods have been proposed. These related specifications were published and circulated as the IETF Internet-Drafts. However, they still have several drawbacks. One of the major drawbacks is that any user can reuse addresses illegally. A user can use an expired address that was allocated to a host. This kind of "illegal use" of the addresses managed by the DHCP server may cause serious security problems. In order to solve them, we propose a new access control method to be used as the DHCP message authentication mechanism. Furthermore, we have designed and developed the DAG (DHCP Access Control Gateway) according to our method. The DAG serves as a gateway that allows only network accesses from clients with the address legally allocated by the DHCP server. This provides secure DHCP service if DHCP servers do not have an authentication mechanism, which is most likely to occur. If a DHCP server has such an authentication scheme as being proposed in IETF Internet-Draft, the DAG can offer a way to enable only a specific client to access the network.