Scalable support for transparent mobile host internetworking

This paper considers the problem of providing transparent support for very large numbers of mobile hosts within a large internetwork such as the Internet. The availability of powerful mobile computing devices and wireless networking products and services is increasing dramatically, but internetworking protocols such as IP used in the Internet cannot currently support host movement. To address this need, the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) is currently developing protocols for mobile hosts in the Internet. This paper reviews the current state of that effort and discusses its scalability to very large numbers of mobile hosts.