End-system-based mobility support in IPv6

Numerous mobility solutions have been proposed in the past, but none of them have been widely deployed today. To address the deployment difficulty in previous work, we propose an end-system-based mobility solution for IPv6 (EMIPv6). In our design, we adhere to the end-to-end principle (Saltzer et al., 1984) by directly performing connection maintenance and data packet delivery between the two communicating hosts. And we leverage distributed hash table-based peer-to-peer (P2P) systems to carry out self-organized, scalable, and robust name lookup for mobile hosts. When the mobility messages such as address updates cannot be delivered directly between the end hosts (e.g., due to firewalls, network address translators, or simultaneous movement), we propose a distributed subscription/notification (S/N) service on top of the previously introduced P2P overlay to deliver them. This leads to a complete end-system solution with small handoff latency and efficient packet delivery. Our simulation results showed that our scheme achieves small name resolution latency by considering host heterogeneity into the design. We have implemented EMIPv6-based end-systems. The experiments in our testbed demonstrated that a complete end-system-based mobility solution is technically feasible and is easy to deploy in the real world without the need of introducing new network components.