Roaming in the global wireless Internet

Roaming across wireless networks and providers works reasonably well in the world´s cellular systems but not in the Internet. That´s not surprising since the Internet was never designed to accommodate mobile endpoints. Despite a decade of hope for mobile IP, it has not yet gained popular acceptance. This paper proposes a more radical approach to Internet mobility, one that fundamentally severs the traditional connection between a host´s IP address and its session endpoint identifier, thus allowing a computer to move from network to network, and provider to provider, without disrupting its active sessions. This approach can be viewed as a marriage of cellular mobility techniques with the Internet protocol suite, and may leverage existing Internet mechanisms for access control and cellular mechanisms for roaming agreements. For clarity, we present a notional sketch of the resultant IPv6 mobility architecture.