Due to the proliferation of mobile devices connected to the Internet, implementing a secure and practical Mobile IP has become an important goal. A mobile IP can not work properly without authentication between the mobile node (MN), the home agent (HA) and the foreign agent (FA). In this paper, we propose a practical Mobile IP authentication protocol that uses public key cryptography only during the initial authentication. The proposed scheme is compatible with the conventional Mobile IP protocol and provides scalability against the number of MN's. We also show that the proposed protocol offers secure operation.