A Proposal for Unifying Mobility with Multi-Homing, NAT & Security

Internet users seek solutions for mobility, multi-homing, support for localised address management (i.e. via NATs), and end-to-end security. Existing mobility approaches are not well integrated into the rest of the Internet architecture, instead primarily being separate extensions that at present are not widely deployed. Because the current approaches to these issues were developed separately, such approaches often are not harmonious when used together. Meanwhile, the Internet has a number of namespaces, for example the IP address or the Domain Name. In recent years, some have postulated that the Internet's namespaces are not sufficiently rich and that the current concept of an address is too limiting. One proposal, the concept of separating an address into an Identifier and a separate Locator, has been controversial in the Internet community for years. It has been considered within the IETF and IRTF several times, but always was rejected as unworkable. This paper takes the position that evolving the naming in the Internet by splitting the address into separate Identifier and Locator names can provide an elegant integrated solution to the key issues listed above, without changing the core routing architecture, while offering incremental deployability through backwards compatibility with IPv6.