Subject: (NAT) chicken-and-egg

From: "Y. C. Tay" <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 22 Mar 1999 06:09:31 +0800 (SST)

At the NAT WG meeting on Friday, there was a remark 
that MobileIP was overtaken by events in the last three years,
that mobile users had no need for permanent globally unique home addresses.
(My apologies for the paraphrasing.)
I think this judgement may be premature.

It is true that there are, currently, almost no mobile applications
that require such addresses, but the reason may simply be that
there is now almost no deployment of mobility support through such addresses.
RAT's primary objective is to break this chicken-and-egg trap
by easing deployment through light-weight mobile clients ---
no tunneling, no location detection, no stack change.

If, after there is infrastructural deployment to support mobile clients
through permanent addresses, new mobile applications remain non-reliant
on this support, then only we know that these addresses are not needed.

Well, maybe.  After all, the Internet had to wait a long time for the Web.

Regards,
  Tay

(RAT is "IP Relocation through Twice Network Address Translation",
described in draft-ietf-nat-rnat-00.txt and developed at the 
National University of Singapore; see
http://cram.iscs.nus.edu.sg:8080/cram/rat .)

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From: Steve Deering <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 22 Mar 1999 06:49:27 -0800

> that mobile users had no need for permanent globally unique home addresses.

The comment was *not* that mobile users had no need for permanent,
globally-unique home addresses, but rather that many mobile users
*can't get* such addresses any more (thanks to IPv4 address rationing).

Steve
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