Dynamic Configuration of Mobile Devices for Wireless Internet Access

This chapter provides a taxonomy of dynamic configuration solutions for mobile devices and focuses on the study of two proposals which use the home agent to mediate a mobile device's access to DHCP, namely, Transient Tunneling and DHCP proxy [8,12,13]. In Transient Tunneling, a home agent is used to temporarily establish an IP tunnel to carry messages between a home DHCP server and a remote client executing on the mobile device. The home agent does not intervene in the DHCP transactions between the server and the client but simply provides a conduit for those transactions to take place. In contrast, the DHCP proxy mechanism uses home agents to serve as proxies or surrogate clients that assume the identity of remote mobile devices and locally transact with DHCP servers in the home network to acquire addresses on their behalf.