Patent ID: 7916702

Claim:
An apparatus used in a communication node in a packet-switched data communication mobile network wherein the communication node serves as a home agent for mobile routers so that a bi-directional tunnel is established between the home agent and one of the mobile routers through which packets sent to the mobile network via the mobile router are intercepted by the home agent and forwarded to the mobile router through the bi-directional tunnel, and packets sent by nodes from the mobile network are intercepted by the mobile router and forwarded to the home agent through the bi-directional tunnel to be further routed to an appropriate destination, the apparatus comprising: an Incoming Packet Processor that processes incoming packets for standard networking protocol processing, and outputs the incoming packets once types of the incoming packets are identified; an Outgoing Packet Processor that performs processing before sending a packet to physical media; a Binding Manager that maintains bindings between home-addresses and care-of-addresses of registered mobile nodes, and handles data packets received by the Incoming Packet Processor that are identified to be related to the bindings of the registered mobile routers' addresses; a Route Manager that maintains routing information and handles routing update messages that are received by the Incoming Packet Processor; a Configuration Interface that provides configuration information about the home agent and all its legal mobile router users; and a Forwarding Unit that is responsible for the routing of packets to other nodes, wherein the Binding Manager temporarily accepts a first binding update from the mobile router that does not explicitly specify any mobile network prefix and does not have a default associated network prefix to wait for the mobile router to run a dynamic routing protocol by specifying a short Lifetime value in a binding acknowledgement, and rejects subsequent binding updates in a case that the mobile router fails to send prefix information using the dynamic routing protocol after a pre-determined period of time elapses since the first binding update is accepted.