INTRODUCTION

SONaccess Mobile Service Foreign Agent is the Foreign Agent counterpart of the Home Agent in Green Packet’s SONaccess Unified Mobility Solution. The Foreign Agent and Home Agent are components of the Mobile IP protocol that provide seamless roaming capabilities to mobile users.

The Foreign Agent is located at the edge of a service provider’s network being “visited” by a roaming mobile user. It is the mobile user’s temporary default router that assists the user in informing his home network of his current care-of-address (COA) and thereby receiving all packets addressed to him at his home network.

Seamless Mobility
• Provide seamless connectivity and mobility across LAN, WLAN and cellular data networks while maintaining continuity of connection to the user's home network.

Improve network handoff speed
• Proactively detect mobile node movements between different networks, allowing for faster and more efficient network handoff thereby enhancing the seamless user experience while roaming.

Off-load CPU-intensive tasks from mobile node
• Mobile nodes connecting via a Foreign Agent (as compared to connecting directly to the Home Agent) can allow CPU-intensive IP packet processing tasks to be handled by the Foreign Agent, thereby leading to better performance on the mobile node.