Abstract: In a mobile communication system having mobile foreign agents, the present invention eliminates the use of multiple source/destination headers attached to an information packet during the tunneling operation by using either a decapsulation/encapsulation or a forwarding operation with the encapsulated information packet. Either of these operations reduces the overhead incurred in the multiple encapsulation headers by reducing encapsulation of the information packet to a single level. Upon receipt of the information packet at the foreign agent on the communications system, the information packet is directed to the mobile node using a routing chain table maintained by the foreign agent or a next hop routing table maintained by the foreign agent and each mobile foreign agent in the transmission path. Once implemented, these data structures can also assist with routing of information packets within the foreign subnetwork.