Some of the routing issues which need to be addressed to achieve the promise of the NGI are discussed briefly below. The incorporation of satellite networks introduces a unidirectional link. This link could be used in the core of the network or at the edge. Routing protocols and algorithms, including multicasting, assume a bi-directional link. To effectively take advantage of this technology requires changes in the generation and distribution of update packets and in the route computation process.
Mobility is treated as a special case within the current Internet.
Tunnels are dynamically created to enable the routing of packets to the mobile devices. As the number of mobile devices increase, the use of tunnels becomes impractical. Furthermore, multicasting to a mobile host will not work in the current Internet because the join mechanism assumes that the receiving device is on a directly attached network. The preservation of the original IP address breaks this assumption as it is viewed by the router. Mobile devices need to follow the same processes as other devices in the Internet.