| Location
Independent Naming
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INTRODUCTION
Currently, most users think of computers as associated with their desktop appliances
or with a server located in a dungeon in some mysterious basement. However, many
of those same users may be considered to be nomads, in that they own computers
and communication devices that they carry about with them in their travels as
they move between office, home, airplane, hotel, automobile, branch office, and
so on. Moreover, even without portable computers or communications, there are
many who travel to numerous locations in their business and personal lives and
who require access to computers and communications when they arrive at their destinations.
Indeed,
even a move from a desk to a conference table in the same office constitutes a
nomadic move since the computing platforms and communications capability may be
considerably different at the two locations. The variety of portable computers
is impressive, ranging from laptop computers, notebook computers, and personal
digital assistants (or personal information managers) to "smart" credit
card devices and wristwatch computers. In addition, the communication capability
of these portable computers is advancing at a dramatic pace from high-speed modems
to PCMCIA modems, e-mail receivers on a card, spread-spectrum hand-held radios,
CDPD transceivers, portable GPS receivers, and gigabit satellite access, and so
on. The combination
of portable computing with portable communications is changing the way we think
about information processing. We now recognize that access to computing and communications
is necessary not only from "home base" but also while in transit and
after reaching a destination.
These ideas form the essence of a major shift to nomadicity (nomadic computing
and communications), which we address in this paper. The focus is on the system
support needed to provide a rich set of capabilities and services, in a transparent
and convenient form, to the nomad moving from place to place.
In this paper we propose location independent naming as a mechanism to support
nomadic computing on the Internet. Nomadic computing is a limited, but common
form of mobile computing.Nomadic users compute from different locations, but do
not require network connectivity while they are moving. For example, a salesman
will travel from customer to customer, using his laptop at each location but storing
it while driving to the next location.
While Mobile IP was designed for continuously moving computers, it can also support
nomadic users. Mobile IP allows users to maintain existing connections while traveling
between networks by allowing machines to carry their IP address with them when
they move to a new network. Unfortunately, preserving IP addresses across networks
introduces several drawbacks, including the performance penalties of triangle
routing; the security problems of IP tunneling through fire-walls, and the loss
of connectivity due to packet loss from source address filters. The drawbacks
are inherent to Mobile IP since it breaks the one-to-one mapping between IP address
and network location that is used by the Internet to route packets to the correct
destination.
Our approach, Location Independent Naming (LIN), allows a machine to keep the
same name as it moves around the Internet by rebinding its name to its local address
when it moves. Once this binding has been made, the machine can communicate with
any other host on the Internet using standard IP routing, since the source address
on its packets identifies the machine's actual location. Further, other machines
on the Internet can communicate with this machine, since its host-name maps to
its current address. While this machine remains at its current location, it behaves
just like any other machine at that location - no special support is needed except
to setup and teardown the name-to-address binding. Because LIN preserves the association
between IP address and location, it avoids the performance and security drawbacks
of Mobile IP for nomadic computers, as well as the complexities of optimizing
Mobile IP. LIN
represents an advance of the state of the art as it allows correspondent hosts
to communicate with a nomadic host using its well-known name without the performance
penalties, security issues, or need for infrastructure support of Mobile IP. It
leverages and extends existing and pro-posed functionality of DNS (Domain Name
System) and DHCP (Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol) to allow a mobile host
to keep its name while moving across security domains using existing trust relationships.
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