Abstract: A mobility support technique provides home agents and foreign agents in mobility aware access networks. Participating mobile hosts are assigned a home address that is used by other hosts as the mobile host's address. The home address actually addresses the home agent provided in the mobility aware access network. The home address provides additional privacy to the mobile host because it does not identify the mobile host's home premises network where the mobile host resides permanently absent any mobility of the mobile host. By providing home agents and foreign agents in a mobility aware access network, the agents may cooperatively establish optimal routing paths for data transmitted to a mobile host. The agents may identify a pseudo home agent, an agent in a mobility aware access network located near to a transmitting mobile host, that acts as the home agent of a destination mobile host.

Abstract: A method of providing high quality multimedia communications between end users uses an ATM-ADSL access system, which provides 6 megabits per second downstream and 640 kilobits per second upstream multimedia signal in conjunction with a multicasting feature. An end user can receive multiple video/audio streams downstream while the end user's video/audio is transmitted upstream to the multicast network and is multicast to the end points.