End to end mobility

I love mobile IP and wish it had been deployed all over by now. Since it has not, we are all sort of waiting for what we will use instead. There has been this proxy MIP effort going on in 3GPP for some time, and it looks to be the solution of choice for the SAE/LTE architecture. It’s interesting to note that the IETF which typically has a sort of standing generalized policy against middleboxes or ‘intelligence in the networks’ raised up both clent MIP and network or proxy MIP, both of which require a good deal of intelligence in the network.

There was also discussion of TCP and higher layer mobility. Also MOBIKE. Perhaps the ideal would be if IP address change didn’t matter at all. SHIM6 and other efforts both standardized and proprietary have been made. Is there room for anything else? Is there something wrong with every solution? No security, too much security, slow handover, triangular routing… there seems to be complaints against all the solutions.

As an escape, or a way to make something, anything, work… application vendors including M$FT seem to be hand coding each application with Application Level Mobility. This has benefits even in the presence of lower layer mobility solutions, so it’s not bad, just platform and even application specific.

Maybe we can still come up with something else…