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.