Patent ID: 7903649

Claim:
A home agent in a mobile Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6) network system, comprising: a home address table comprising home addresses of a plurality of mobile nodes and binding cache entry indexes corresponding to the home addresses; a next-hop entry table comprising a plurality of next hop entries mapped to care-of addresses of the mobile nodes, each next hop entry comprising an address of a next node to which a packet received from the mobile node is to be transmitted, and port information of a home agent by which the packet received from the mobile node is forwarded to the next node; a binding cache entry table comprising a plurality of binding cache entries mapped to the binding cache entry indexes, each binding cache entry comprising a home address of the mobile node, a life time of a care-of address of the mobile node, an output port of the home agent used for transmitting the packet from the mobile node to a correspondent node, and an address of a node next to the home agent to which the packet directed to the correspondent node is transmitted from the mobile node; and a packet processor for, when a source address of a packet received by the home agent is included in the home address table in a state where forwarding direction information included in the packet received by the home agent differs from a set forwarding direction information, encapsulating and forwarding the packet received by the home agent using a binding cache entry that is mapped to a binding cache entry index corresponding to the source address included in the home address table.