Subject: WG Review: Mobility for IPv6 (mip6)

From: The IESG <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 26 Aug 2003 10:37:53 -0400

A new IETF working group has been proposed in the Internet
Area.The IESG has not made any determination as yet. The
following description was submitted, and is provided for 
informational purposes only: 

 Mobility for IPv6 (mip6)
 ------------------------
 Current Status: Proposed Working Group

 Description of Working Group:

Mobile IPv6 (MIPv6) specifies routing support to permit IPv6 hosts to
continue using its "permanent" home address as it moves around
the Internet. Mobile IPv6 supports transparency above the IP
layer, including maintenance of active TCP connections and UDP port
bindings. The specifications for these mechanisms consist of:

      draft-ietf-mobileip-ipv6-24 and
      draft-ietf-mobleip-mipv6-ha-ipsec-06

The protocol as specified in the above two documents can be considered as
the baseline or minimum protocol set for implementing IPv6
mobility. During the development phase of the base protocol, a few
additional features were identified as necessary to facilitate
deployment (described below).

The primary goal of the MIP6 working group is to improve the base
specification as a result of experience gained from implementation and
interop testing and to work on items that are deemed critical to getting
MIPv6 deployable on a large scale. Specifically, this includes:

1) Refining the base specifications based on experience of initial
      implementations and interoperability testing.

2) Features such as renumbering of the home link, home agent discovery,
      Route Optimization, which are currently a part of the base
      specification can be specified more explicitly as separate
      specifications. This will also enable modularizing the Mobile
      IPv6 specification further into the minimal subset and add-on
      features. Some of these specifications will be identified as
      base mechanisims of Mobile IPv6.

3) A number of enhancements to basic IPv6 mobility were identified
      during the development of the base specification. These
      enhancements would be taken up in a phased manner depending on the
      priority identified with each. Below are listed the work items to
      be taken up by the WG:

        - A bootstrap mechanism for setting up security associations
            between the MN and HA that would enable easier deployment of
            Mobile IPv6. This bootstrap mechanisim is intended to be used
            when the device is turned on the very first time and activa
            MIP. The WG should investigate and define the scope before
            solving the problem.

        - Improving home agent reliability: in the even of a home agent
            crashing, this would allow another home agent to continue
            providing service to a given mobile node.
       
        - Support for the MN's changing addresses either because of
            renumbering in its home network or because it periodically
            changes addresses (perhaps via rfc3041)
           
        - Route optimization will require security mechanisims for
            trusting and updating the binding information. Return-routability
            is the basic mechanism for route-optimization. Mechanisims using
            a shared secret Key/Security Association will be considered.
            Methods for establishing a security association between the mobile
            node and the correspondent node are out of the scope of the WG.

        - The working group will also document problem statements
            associated with deploying Mobile IPv6 in the following areas:
              a. Mobile IPv6 issues in the presence of firewalls
              b. Mobile IPv6 deployment and transition issues in the presence
                    of IPv4/IPv6 networks
              c. Multicast issues

It should be noted that there are potential optimizations that might
make mobile IP more attractive for use by certain applications (e.g.,
making handovers "faster"). The latter category of optimizations is
explicitly out-of-scope at this time; this WG will focus on issues
for which there is strong consensus that the work is needed to get
basic mobility deployable on a large scale.