Enabling Mobile Networks through secure naming

Mobile networks are increasingly important in land-, sea-and air-based military scenarios. The interest in supporting network mobility for Internet protocol (IP) networks has led to the network mobility (NEMO) protocol extensions being proposed for IP within the IETF. These extensions are based on the work already completed on host mobility for mobile IP (MIP). The current work is based on the use of software agents: a home agent (HA) intercepts packets destined for the addresses in the mobile network and uses an IP-in-IP tunnel to send the packets to the mobile router (MR) located at a care of address (CoA), which terminates the tunnel. As the mobile network moves to new IP networks, the MR updates the HA with its new CoA. While this tunnelling approach represents a sound engineering solution for backwards compatibility, and is the only one that has been pursued within the IETF, it has seen little deployment, either in support of mobile hosts or mobile networks. We make the case for an alternative approach based on secure naming. We make a comparison in operation with the current tunnelling-based approach, both in architecture and by analysis of protocol operation. Our initial analyses indicate that a naming-based approach shows promise as a viable alternative to a tunnelling-based approach, and could offer other architectural benefits.