Host Identity Protocol

This chapter is committed to give a comprehensive overview of the Host Identity Protocol (HIP), to introduce the basic ideas and the main paradigms behind it, and to show how HIP emerges from the list of potential alternatives with its wild range of possible usability in next generation mobile architectures. The broad scale of feasible advanced mobility management proposals and scenarios, together with the promising mobility management capabilities of HIP and its cryptographic identifier/locator separation technique, will be introduced based on an exhaustive survey of existing mobility solutions designed for the Host Identity Protocol. This broad and up-to-date outline of advanced HIP-based mobility supporting schemes will guide the readers from the basics of HIP through the protocol’s main functions to its complex feature set and power to create a novel Internet architecture for future mobility-centric communications.