"Mobility First" architecture concepts at the FIS summit

[Dipankar Raychaudhuri]

The mobility first proposal is based on the recognition that Internet usage is changing very rapidly from fixed hosts to mobile devices such as cell phones, portable computers, machines and sensors. It is anticipated that by 2015, mobile/wireless devices will vastly outnumber fixed hosts (~10B mobiles vs. ~1B hosts), motivating us to design a new Internet architecture that directly addresses this very predictable yet fundamental change in network usage. Our vision is that of a future Internet architecture which supports mobile and embedded devices as “first-class” users (no gateways!), thus enabling a variety of new applications efficiently, securely, and at scale. Such a network should lead to new types of economic models resulting from cellular/Internet convergence, while also serving as a key enabler for emerging cyber-physical or M2M applications involving networked observation and control of the physical world.

The central tenets of the proposed “mobility first” architecture are: dynamic end-point and network mobility as the norm; robustness in the presence of disconnection; support for heterogeneity of devices and technologies; opportunistic communications for energy constrained wireless devices; addressability and routing of content; multicast, anycast and multi-homing modes as basic services; and location as a fundamental network attribute. Based on preliminary results with key components, we believe that a network architecture built from the above principles can achieve most of the desired functional requirements of future Internet along with order-of-magnitude gains in network capacity and performance over IP-based solutions for representative mobile and wireless usage scenarios. In addition, the same architecture is also expected to work very well for the special case of fixed hosts because mobility and disconnection imply extra-strength network capabilities for security, privacy, availability and robustness. We also note that design for portable mobile devices also involves complexity and energy constraints at mobile nodes and routers, so that the architecture is a good basis for emerging cloud computing and green networking models.

Comments and discussion on above concept and specific protocol components are welcome.

[Suman Banerjee]

I think this is an important concept that needs to be embraced in the future Internet's design. One of the things that came up in our discussion was that even hosts that are supposed to be static in many cases, are actually mobile due to increase in virtualization technologies. Services routinely move physically from one host to another.
In the end, the Internet serves its users. If the users are primarily mobile, then the architecture needs to reflect this.