Home Agent Considerations

Home agents play an active role in the registration process. The home agent receives registration requests from the mobile node (perhaps relayed by a foreign agent), updates its record of the mobility bindings for this mobile node, and issues a suitable registration reply in response to each. The home agent also forwards packets to the mobile node when the mobile node is away from its home network.

A home agent might not have to have a physical subnet configured for mobile nodes. However, the home agent must recognize its mobile node's home address through the mipagent.conf file or some other mechanism when the home agent grants registration.