A new addressing solution for scalable routing in the presence of mobility

The routing architecture in today´s IP networks relies on IP addresses that are overloaded in the sense that they are used as both identifiers (IDs) and addresses (locators). This makes it hard to support the need for multi-homing, traffic engineering, and mobility while maintaining address hierarchy that is essential for scalable routing. Thus, there is a need to separate identifiers from locators. In this paper we discuss a novel approach to this separation and define an architecture that exploits this separation to achieve routing scalability. While most of current proposals to ID-address separation are focused on solving the multi-homing and traffic engineering problems for commercial Internet, we develop a solution that addresses these two problems as well as the need to support network mobility which is more important for the GIG tactical domains. Besides scalability, our protocol solution (address-identifier mapping system - AIMS) provides rapid response to mobility by making IDs flat and portable while keeping addressing hierarchical and dynamic.