Hi Jari,

A couple of quick questions:


1.       Is this a recharter of the MEXT WG or the formation of a new WG to 
deal with DMM? If it is the latter I would be concerned that a WG is being 
formed without going through the IETF BoF process. I realize that DMM was in 
the scope of the MEXT WG. But proposed new charter pretty much throws 
everything else w.r.t MIP6/DSMIP6 out of this new WG.

2.       There needs to be a WG and home for continued work w.r.t improvements 
to MIP6/DSMIP6 protocol in terms of extensions, deployability improvements etc. 
The proposed charter does not consider this at all.

-Basavaraj

From: mext-boun...@ietf.org [mailto:mext-boun...@ietf.org] On Behalf Of ext 
Jari Arkko
Sent: Friday, October 28, 2011 7:21 AM
To: mext@ietf.org
Subject: Re: [MEXT] the future of the MEXT working group

And a follow-up on the charter. I'm describing a couple of different takes on 
what the new charter could be. Comments and alternative proposals are welcome. 
This is what the current charter says about DMM:


  The working group will also work on operational considerations on
  setting up Mobile IPv6 networks so that traffic is distributed
  in an optimal way, for instance by using existing protocol mechanisms
  to select the closest home agents for new clients.

  Oct 2011 - Submit I-D 'Operational considerations for distributed use of 
Mobile IPv6' for publication as Informational.

Which is admittedly a bit short, but is also very concrete and achievable, if 
we work on it. I got another proposal from Hui Deng that extended this a bit, 
including going beyond mere operational considerations.


In the past decade a fair number of mobility protocols have been standardized. 
Although the protocols differ in terms of functions and associated message 
format, we can identify a few key common features:
presence of a centralized mobility anchor providing global reachability and an 
always-on experience
extensions to optimize handover performance while users roam across wireless 
cells
extensions to enable the use of heterogeneous wireless interfaces for 
multi-mode terminals (e.g. cellular phones)
The presence of the centralized mobility anchor allows a mobile device to be 
reachable when it is not connected to its home domain. The anchor, among other 
tasks, ensures forwarding of packets destined to or sent from the mobile 
device. As such, most of the deployed architectures today have a small number 
of centralized anchors managing the traffic of millions of mobile subscribers.

To optimize handovers for mobile users, the base protocols have been extended 
to efficiently handle packet forwarding between the previous and new points of 
attachment. These extensions are necessary when applications impose stringent 
requirements in terms of delay. Notions of localization and distribution of 
local agents have been introduced to reduce signalling overhead. Unfortunately 
today we witness difficulties in getting such protocols deployed, often leading 
to sub-optimal choices. Moreover, all the availability of multi-mode devices 
and the possibility to use several network interfaces simultaneously have 
motivated the development of more new protocol extensions.

Mobile users are, more than ever, consuming Internet content, and impose new 
requirements on mobile core networks for data traffic delivery. When this 
traffic demand exceeds available capacity, service providers need to implement 
new strategies such as selective traffic offload (e.g. 3GPP work items 
LIPA/SIPTO) through alternative access networks (e.g. WLAN). Moreover, the 
localization of content providers closer to the Mobile/Fixed Internet Service 
Providers network requires taking into account local Content Delivery Networks 
(CDNs) while providing mobility services.

As long as demand exceeds capacity, both offloading and CDN techniques could 
benefit from the development of more flat mobile architectures (i.e., fewer 
levels of routing hierarchy introduced into the data path by the mobility 
management system). This view is reinforced by the shift in users' traffic 
behaviour, aimed at increasing direct communications among peers in the same 
geographical area. The development of truly flat mobile architectures would 
result in anchoring the traffic closer to point of attachment of the user and 
overcoming the suboptimal routing issues of a centralized mobility scheme.

While deploying today's mobile networks, service providers face new challenges. 
More often than not, mobile devices remain attached to the same point of 
attachment, in which case specific IP mobility management support is not 
required for applications that launch and complete while connected to the same 
point of attachment. However, the mobility support has been designed to be 
always on and to maintain the context for each mobile subscriber as long as 
they are connected to the network. This can result in a waste of resources and 
ever-increasing costs for the service provider. Infrequent mobility and 
intelligence of many applications suggest that mobility can be provided 
dynamically, thus simplifying the context maintained in the different nodes of 
the mobile network.

The proposed charter will address two complementary aspects of mobility 
management procedures: the distribution of mobility anchors to achieve a more 
flat design and the dynamic activation/deactivation of mobility protocol 
support as an enabler to distributed mobility management. The former has the 
goal of positioning mobility anchors (HA, LMA) closer to the user; ideally, 
these mobility anchors could be collocated with the first hop router. The 
latter, facilitated by the distribution of mobility anchors, aims at 
identifying when mobility must be activated and identifying sessions that do 
not impose mobility management -- thus reducing the amount of state information 
to be maintained in the various mobility anchors of the mobile network. The key 
idea is that dynamic mobility management relaxes some constraints while also 
repositioning mobility anchors; it avoids the establishment of non optimal 
tunnels between two anchors topologically distant.

Considering the above, the working group will:

Define the problem statement and associated requirements for distributed 
mobility management. This work aims at defining the problem space and 
identifies the key functional requirements.

Produce a gap analysis mapping the above requirements against existing 
solutions.

Give best practices for the deployment of existing mobility protocols in a 
distributed mobility management and describe limitations of each such approach.

Describe extensions, if needed, to current mobility protocols for their 
application in distributed mobility architectures

Comments?

Jari
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