On the cost of supporting mobility and multihoming

As the Internet has evolved and grown, an increasing number of nodes (hosts or autonomous systems) have become multihomed, i.e., a node is connected to more than one network. Multihoming can be viewed as a special case of mobility - as a node moves, it unsubscribes from one network and subscribes to another, which is akin to one interface becoming inactive and another active. The current Internet architecture has been facing significant challenges in effectively dealing with mobility (and consequently multihoming). The Recursive InterNetwork Architecture (RINA) was recently proposed as a clean-slate solution to the current problems of the Internet. In this paper, we perform an average-case cost analysis to compare the mobility/multihoming support of RINA, against that of other approaches such as LISP and Mobile-IP. We also validate our analysis using simulation.