The Design Space of Network Mobility

While the Internet is increasingly mobile, seamless mobility is difficult to implement at Internet scale. Over the years, standards bodies and the research community have introduced a large and confusing collection of mobility proposals that are difficult to compare. In this tutorial, we present these mobility proposals in a uniform framework, called the geomorphic view of networking. The geomorphic view shows that there are two distinct patterns for implementing mobility, each with its own range of design choices and cost-benefit trade-offs. We use these patterns to classify and explain a representative sample of mobility mechanisms, abstractly yet precisely. The patterns also serve as a basis for evaluating properties of these mechanisms such as resource costs and scalability, and for considering composition of mobility mechanisms.