Seamless and transparent migration for TCP sessions

Personal communication devices are extensively used for mobile computing thanks to ever increasing wireless coverage and processing capability. However, they are constrained in terms of both human interaction (screen size and resolution, keyboard) and lifetime; hence mobile computing often relies on the possibility to migrate applications and communication sessions among several (fixed or mobile) devices. Session migration is a challenging feature, especially when communication with other hosts is involved, and the current Internet architecture does not support natively this paradigm. In this paper, we address seamless and transparent session migration for the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) that maintains compatibility with current Internet; hence, our work keeps the remote TCP peer unaware of the migration process. We describe the latest features of the Linux kernel that allow the migration of a TCP session and a couple of alternatives to divert network packets towards the new destination.