Providing scalable and deployable addressing in third-generation cellular-networks

Over the past few years, information technology has changed the way we live, work, and communicate with each other. The two outstanding trends of Internet and cellular telephony growth will now enter a new phase when the two technologies converge into 2.5 and 3G networks. The success of cellular telephony is due to the mobility factor, and the success of the Internet is due to its architecture, which allows a multitude of services to use the same simple infrastructure. The rollout of these networks has already started around the world, but there are still outstanding issues that are essential to resolve if the technology is to be a success. One crucial issue is the address space limitation of IPv4 and its impact on cellular network scalability. To date, there have been a number of proposals on how to alleviate this problem. However, as we discuss in this article, these solutions will not meet the demands of the mobile Internet in that they will either not scale satisfactorily or severely limit the services that can be deployed. We therefore introduce a new solution that will scale satisfactorily while preserving the Internet model of catering for a multitude of services.