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Network Mobility
charter-ietf-nemo-02

Document Charter Network Mobility WG (nemo)
Title Network Mobility
Last updated 2007-11-20
State Approved
WG State Concluded
IESG Responsible AD Jari Arkko
Charter edit AD (None)
Send notices to (None)

charter-ietf-nemo-02

The NEMO Working Group is concerned with managing the mobility of an
entire network, which changes its point of attachment to the Internet
and thus its reachability in the network topology. The mobile network
includes one or more mobile routers (MRs) which connect the rest of
the mobile network to the global Internet.

For the purposes of this working group, a mobile network is a leaf
network; it does not carry transit traffic. Nonetheless, it could be
multihomed, either with a single MR that has multiple attachments to
the Internet, or by using multiple MRs that attach the mobile network
to the Internet.

For the basic NEMO support case, none of the nodes behind the MR need
be aware of the network's mobility; thus, the network's movement is
completely transparent to the nodes inside the mobile network. This
design consideration was made to accommodate nodes inside the network
that are not generally aware of mobility.

Basic network mobility support is described in RFC 3963. This RFC
contains NEMO Basic Support, which is a protocol based on Mobile IPv6
(RFC 3775, 3776) that enables network mobility in an IPv6 network.

The working group is tasked with continuing to evolve RFC 3963 to
correct errors and maintain the specification. In addition, the group
works in co-operation with the MIP6 WG to design a mechanism to allow
mixed IPv4/IPv6 networks to be used.

At this point, the working group is concerned with solving deployment
issues of NEMO, primarily relating to the identified needs of the
automotive and aviation communities. The group will gather
requirements from those builders and users, and then solve the route
optimization issues necessary for optimized deployments.

Among the deployments that have issues which may be solved by NEMO
Route Optimization feature(s), we have identified three cases that
have a likelihood of requirements gathering and an Optimization
solution. These are called the Aviation case, the Automotive case, and
the Personal Mobile Router (consumer electronics) case, though the
actual technical problems are characterized by the type of movements
and environments more than by the specific industry using the
technology. The group will explore these cases to gather requirements
and, if those requirements match the capability of a NEMO RO solution
space, proceed with solving the open issues.

The WG will:

  • Finish working group documents that are currently in process, and
    submit for RFC. This includes prefix delegation protocol mechanisms, a
    multihoming problem statement, and a MIB for NEMO Basic Support.

  • Gather requirements for NEMO Route Optimization in deployment
    scenarios:

(1) Airline and spacecraft community, who are deploying NEMO for
control systems, as well as Internet connectivity and entertainment
systems. This use case is characterized by fast (~ 1000 km/h) moving
objects over large distances (across continents). The main technical
problem is that tunneling-based solutions imply a roundtrip to another
continent and that BGP based solutions imply significant churn in the
global Internet routing table.

(2) Automotive industry who are deploying NEMO for in-car
communication, entertainment, and data gathering, possible control
systems use, and communication to roadside devices. This use case is
characterized by moderately fast (~ 100-300 km/h) moving objects that
employ local or cellular networks for connectivity.

(3) Personal Mobile Routers, which are consumer devices that allow the
user to bring a NEMO network with the user while mobile, and
communicate with peer NEMO networks/MNNs.

After gathering the requirements for these types of deployments, the
working group will evaluate what type of route optimization needs to
be performed (if any), and formulate a solution to those problems.

If no requirements for those scenarios can be collected by the
deadline, it will be assumed that the work is premature, and that type
of deployment will be dropped from the list of use cases currently
addressed by NEMO.

The group will only consider airline and spacecraft solutions that
combine tunneling solutions for small movements with either federated
tunnel servers or slowly changing end host prefixes.

The group will only consider personal mobile router requirements about
optimized routes to another mobile router belonging to the same
operator.

The group will only consider automotive industry requirements to allow
MR-attached hosts to directly access the network where MR has attached
to.

Work on automotive and personal mobile router solutions requires
rechartering.

The WG will not:

  • consider routing issues inside the mobile network. Existing routing
    protocols (including MANET protocols) can be used to solve these
    problems.

  • consider general route optimization, multihoming, or other problems
    that are not related to the deployment and maintenance of NEMO
    networks.

  • consider or rely on the results of general routing architecture,
    Internet architecture, or identifier-locator split issues that are
    discussed in separate, long term efforts elsewhere in the IETF

  • consider solutions that require changes from correspondent nodes in
    the general Internet

The working group will endeavor to separate research issues, and refer
them to the IRTF as appropriate.