VPN Tunnel Interface for Hardware Address Consistency
Find Innovative SolutionsGenerate Solutions
Solution Overview
Problem
Mobile devices associated with customer premises equipment often have unknown hardware addresses, making it difficult for users to configure parental controls or access these devices, especially when they roam across different networks.
Innovation Solution
Implementing a VPN tunnel interface and virtual peers within a router, which instantiates virtual Ethernet interfaces to maintain consistent network addresses, allowing traffic to be routed based on source addresses and ensuring connectivity through a VPN tunnel.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Adaptability or versatility
If mobile devices roam across different networks, then network connectivity and mobility are improved, but hardware address consistency deteriorates making device location and access difficult
Solution Approach 1:
The patent introduces a VPN tunnel as an intermediary between the mobile device and the home network. The tunnel encapsulates Ethernet frames with the device's home hardware address, allowing the device to roam across different networks while maintaining address consistency. The VPN tunnel interface acts as a mediator that preserves the original hardware address information through encapsulation and decapsulation operations.
Solution Approach 2:
The patent creates a virtual peer that copies the mobile device's hardware address and uses it as the source address in encapsulated frames. This copying mechanism ensures that the hardware address remains consistent with the device's home network identity, even when the device physically moves to different networks. The virtual ethernet interface on the VPN server copies and maintains this address information.
2Loss of information
If VPN tunnel interface and virtual peers are instantiated, then hardware address consistency is improved, but system complexity increases
Solution Approach 1:
The patent makes the VPN tunnel interface multi-functional by using it both for general VPN connectivity and specifically for maintaining hardware address consistency. The same tunnel infrastructure that provides secure remote access also serves as the mechanism for address preservation. This eliminates the need for separate dedicated mechanisms and reduces overall system complexity.
Solution Approach 2:
The patent implements nesting by encapsulating Ethernet frames within VPN protocol data units. The original Ethernet frame containing the device's hardware address is nested inside the VPN tunnel protocol, which is itself nested within IP packets for transmission. This nested structure allows the hardware address to be preserved through multiple protocol layers without requiring separate management systems.
3Ease of operation
If routing is configured based on source address, then device accessibility is improved, but routing complexity increases
Solution Approach 1:
The patent enables self-service routing where the VPN tunnel interface automatically performs source address-based routing decisions. The kernel routing table is configured with the VPN tunnel interface as the gateway, and the system automatically routes packets based on source address matching without requiring manual intervention. The virtual peer automatically encapsulates packets with the correct source address, eliminating the need for complex manual routing configurations.
Data Source
AI summary
A VPN tunnel interface is instantiated within a router based on a tunnel network namespace. One or more virtual peers corresponding to the VPN tunnel interface and one or more virtual ethernet interfaces corresponding to the one or more virtual peers are instantiated. The tunnel network namespace is configured to route, based on a source address, network traffic from a specified client device to a specified virtual peer of the one or more virtual peers via the VPN tunnel interface. A connection is established between a client device and a VPN process of the router and a traffic flow is transported to and from the client device through a VPN tunnel via the VPN tunnel interface, the one or more virtual peers, and the one or more virtual ethernet interfaces.