Enabling Seamless Internet Mobility

Mobility is a requirement not appropriately addressed by the original design of the Internet since an IP address has two fundamentally different tasks. It specifies a network location (for routing) and serves as an application identifier. A plethora of suggestions have been made to overcome this, e.g., Mobile IP and HIP. Yet, each of the proposed solutions has drawbacks such as requiring fundamental changes to the Internet architecture or relying on triangular routing. We propose the Seamless Internet Mobility System (SIMS) for enabling seamless IP network layer mobility. Our goals are (1) to enable mobility even for users that do not have a permanent IP address and therefore cannot rely on a Mobile IP home agent; (2) to impose no overhead for applications initiating network traffic in the current network; (3) to preserve sessions that started in any previously visited network location; (4) to be robust, scalable, and easily deployable in the current Internet; (5) address the economics of roaming between different administrative domains. The key ideas are to allow any new connection to use the current IP address and to take advantage of the heavy-tailed nature of connections. This implies that after a network change only a small number of connections need to be retained.