Review: End2End Approach to Host Mobility

Number of mobile clients are increasing at a rapid rate. In oder to cater
for the mobility of
these clients across networks we require a mechanism through which mobile
hosts can continue
their trasmission seamlessly even if their IP addresse changes becasue of
mobility. One of the most
profound work in this domain is teh Mobile IP project. Mobile IP makes the
mobile clients retain TCP
connections from multiple location (different IP addresses) and to provide
this support Mobile IP requires changing the underline IP substrate. In
this paper author has purposed a novel approach to host mobility that does
not require any changes in traditional IP substrate.

The approach purposed by the author is based on the end-to-end argument
and relies on making changes at the application layer thus giving more
control to application. Auhtor has suggested the
use of Domain Name System (DNS) to locate mobile hosts becasue of its
ability to support dynamic
updates. In order to support trasparent connectivity across network
address change the end hosts
first negotiate secure migration using a new end-to-end TCP option
purposed by the author. Using this
option the mobile host can suspend the TCP session and reactivate it after
address change. The author has argued that the appraoch is secure becasue
it require the initial session key and the sequence number to reactivate
the session thus avoiding connection hijacking,

The approach purposed seems to be an efficient solution becasue it support
mobility without requiring any
change in the underlying network infrastructure. Only change required is
at the application level that
is not very difficult to implement. Though author has argued that it
prevents the denial of service attack
but I feel there is still a way in which a malicious user can attack a
server. By opening number of migratable TCP/IP session and putting them in
wait state a malicious client can consume significant
resource at the server.
Received on Thu Oct 19 2006 - 10:57:22 EDT