INFOCOM 2005 Panel Proposal Title: How Does Mobility Fit Into the Internet Layering Scheme? Moderator: Wesley M. Eddy -- NASA GRC / Verizon FNS -- weddy@grc.nasa.gov Panelists: Hesham Soliman -- Flarion -- H.Soliman@flarion.com Alex C. Snoeren -- UCSD -- snoeren@cs.ucsd.edu Pekka Nikander -- Ericsson Research Lab / Helsinki Institute for Information Technology -- pekka.nikander@nomadiclab.com Yogesh Prem Swami -- Nokia Research -- yogesh.swami@nokia.com Will Ivancic -- NASA GRC -- wivancic@grc.nasa.gov Abstract: Bringing network service to mobile users has been an active area of research for a number of years. Numerous approaches have been developed by the community to provide mobility support in vastly differing ways. One of the key differences between mobility support protocols is the layer of the protocol stack at which they primarily operate. This layering decision has a great impact on the usefulness and scalability of each mobility protocol. At this time, it is not clear what type of mobility protocol best fits the current Internet achitecture and user-base. In this panel, we have speakers who have developed or done extensive work with mobility protocols at at several stack layers, who will debate the various strengths and weaknesses of approaches at each layer. Description: Topics of discussion may range from practical aspects such as deployment issues, security implementation issues, and user experiences, to more theoretical or philosophical aspects, like the difference between a host's address and its location, the cleanliness of the routing architectures implied by different mobility protocols, and the extensibility of mobility architectures as the Internet evolves. The panel is composed of members with rather different backgrounds, and so promises to supply a wide variety of viewpoints from different niches of expertise. A number of proposals for mobility support for Internet users have arisen within the IETF in recent years, taking stances at different layers of the protocol stack. These include Mobile IP (for IPv4 and IPv6) for end hosts, and entire mobile networks within the NEMO group, mobility based on the Host Identity Protocol, mobility support for various transport protocols, including TCP, SCTP, and DCCP, and more basic mobility support, such as that provided by the Detecting Network Attachment working group and IPv6 Neighbor Discovery. Despite the large amount of work being done in the realm of mobility, few attempts have been made to outline and discuss the differences between mobility approaches at various levels. Two relevant documents for this discussion include Eddy's "At What Layer Does Mobility Belong?" in the October issue of IEEE Communications Magazine and the IETF internet draft "An Architecture for Transport Layer Mobility" (draft-eddy-tlmarch-00). The first of these documents compares and contrasts the strengths and weaknesses of providing mobility support at various layers, and concludes that mobility support would benefit from more cooperation between layers, and that due to infrastructure requirements, network layer mobility may not be as feasible as higher layer solutions. However, these statements are open for discussion, and convincing arguments may be made both for and against them. The second reference attempts to unify some of the transport layer mobility work into a common architecture, for more practical operating system support and easier deployment. A large portion of the document discusses numerous differences between a transport layer mobility approach and Mobile IP, a network layer approach. Relevance to INFOCOM: The topic of mobility is of interest to a large subsection of the INFOCOM community, both among acedemic, industrial, and government researchers and network practitioners. Typically, an individual's work experience consists mainly of exploring mobility support within a particular layer, and we often do not consider the major design differences implied by schemes at other layers. This panel provides an excellent opportunity to hear mobility support arguments for protocols at different layers, which have vastly different implications for deployment, usability, and user-convenience, privacy, and security. This will be an interesting way for INFOCOM attendees to get perspective on their own work, while learning more about both industy's currently-used mobility solutions, and the research community's future visions. We think that INFOCOM attendees will be both educated and entertained by this panel and its enthusiastic members. Biographical Sketches: Wesley M. Eddy is a researcher with Verizon Federal Network Systems, at NASA's Glenn Research Center, in Cleveland, Ohio. He holds B.S. and M.S. degrees in computer science from Ohio University, earned in 2002 and 2004. His research interests include mobile networking and extending the Internet suite to better facilitate space-based communications. Hesham Soliman is a member of the Advanced Networking group at Flarion Technologies. His current responsibilities include developing solutions for mobility management and peer to peer communication in Flarion's Flash OFDM cellular system. He is a technical program committee member of the First IEEE symposium on IP mobility, IPCN conference and a member of the IPv6 Technical Directorate in the IPv6 forum. He is a key contributor to the development of Mobile IPv6 and other related specifications in IETF. Prior to his current position, he was a Senior Specialist at Ericsson research in Stockholm, where he led research and standardisation activities specialising in mobility management, IPv6 and network mobility. Alex C. Snoeren is an Assistant Professor in the Computer Science and Engineering Department at the University of California, San Diego, where he is a member of the Systems and Networking Research Group. His research interests include operating systems, distributed computing, and mobile and wide-area networking. Professor Snoeren received a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (2003) and an M.S. in Computer Science (1997) and Bachelors of Science in Computer Science (1996) and Applied Mathematics (1997) from the Georgia Institute of Technology. He is a recipient of the National Science Foundation CAREER Award (2004) and the MIT EECS George M. Sprowls Doctoral Dissertation Award (Honorable Mention, 2003), and the Best Student Paper award at the ACM SIGCOMM conference (2001). Pekka Nikander has the positions of Chief Scientist at Ericsson Research NomadicLab and Ericsson Visiting Senior Scientist at the Helsinki Institute for Information Technology. His research interests involve security in distributed and mobile systems, wearable and ubiquitous computing applications, security architectures, and cryptographic protocols. Yogesh Swami is a researcher with Nokia Research Center, in Dallas. He holds a bachelor's degree from Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Bombay and Master's degree from Columbia University, earned in 1999 and 2001 respectively. Yogesh's research interests include Transport Layer Protocols, Cryptography, and Network Security. Will Ivancic is a senior research engineer at NASA's Glenn Research Center. he received BSEE and MSEE degrees from Cleveland State University in 1982 and 1986, and has been with NASA since 1982. He is currently technical director of hybrid satellite/terrestrial networking, space-based Internet, and aeronautical Internet research, and has been performing joint research with Cisco on advanced routing for space-based and aeronautic-based networks. Of particular interest is large scale, secure deployment of mobile networks, including Mobile IP and mobile router technology.