Who Actually Utilizes Mobile IP?

Question

I'm presently teaching a networking class, and the various texts that I've cobbled together all discuss Mobile IP. I always try to give real-world examples of how protocols are utilized, but the problem is: I'm not sure who / what actually uses Mobile IP.

Other than a handful of papers that have studied Mobile IPv6, virtually everything I see that discusses Mobile IP seems to be about a decade old. So my question is: is/was Mobile IP actually implemented in anything, and what is it being used for now?

Answer 1

I'd love to be corrected, but I believe that MobileIP was stillborn. There's a paper here from a researcher at Rutgers that summarizes the situation. The problem it was trying to solve - splitting the use of an IPv4 address as an endpoint identifier and a routing label - became less important once the (mobile) community embraced IPv6.

Answer 2

I was a Sprint cellular subscriber for parts of the 2000s decade and I am 99% sure they used Mobile IP on their CDMA 1xRTT/1xEV-DO network.

I recall Sprint cell phones of the era coming with the IP address(es) of a "home agent" configured in their settings. I never saw the need to (or even experimented with) change my HA settings but I do recall people discussing some Sprint HAs being "faster" (less oversubscribed?) than others, as well as suggesting that selecting an HA near your physical location would result in less latency between the handset/UE and the Internet (presumably at the cost of a one-time change of IP address), as in the following thread from 2006:

http://www.evdoforums.com/thread2001.html