Transparent Mobility with Minimal Infrastructure

In this paper, we introduce VIP -- a virtual IP layer -- that applies the principle of virtual addressing to Internet naming. VIP''s goal is to support mobility in a way that is incrementally deployable and that requires little installation or configuration effort. VIP achieves this goal by following two design principles (1) transparent mobility: the system virtualizes the IP level of the protocol stack -- the "neck (of the protocol hourglass" to avoid modifying higher-level network protocols and applications, and (2) minimal infrastructure: the system takes advantage of and minimizes changes to existing network infrastructure. In particular, VIP relies on widely-deployed infrastructure -- DHCP for dynamic IP assignment, Dynamic Secure DNS for updating name-to-IP mappings, and IPSec for secure communication -- rather than requiring deployment of new translation infrastructure. Overall, we find that VIP efficiently supports transparent mobility in a way that an individual