Roaming in the Global Wireless Internet

Abstract

Roaming across wireless networks and providers works reasonably well in the world’s cellular systems but not in the Internet. That’s not entirely surprising since the Internet was never designed to accommodate mobile endpoints. Despite a decade of hope for Mobile IP as the Internet’s new mechanism for mobility, it has not yet gained popular acceptance. This paper proposes a more radical approach to Internet mobility, one that fundamentally severs the traditional connection between a host’s IP address and its session endpoint identifier, thus allowing a computer to move from network to network, and provider to provider, without disrupting its active sessions. This approach can be viewed as a marriage of cellular mobility techniques with the Internet Protocol suite, and may leverage existing Internet mechanisms for access control and cellular mechanisms for roaming agreements. For clarity, we present a notional sketch of the resultant IPv6 mobility architecture.