Application Mobility with HIP

Process migration, or application mobility as we call it, is the act of moving a process or an application between hosts during its execution. It enhances load management, fault resilience, and data access locality. Regardless of its impressive potential, it can’t be considered a commercial success due to its currently limited deployment. A reason for the failure is the complexity process migration creates in order to operate transparently from application’s perspective. Transparent network communication for migration capable operating systems has traditionally required either custom application or kernel implemented protocols, both breaking general interoperability. Perhaps surprisingly, mobility and multi-homing driven identifier/locator split architecture model provides an elegant solution for this classic problem. In this paper, we present an initial architecture for application mobility utilizing perhaps the most promising candidate for the identifier/locator split, Host Identity Protocol (HIP). Our novel use of the protocol introduces new requirements for HIP itself. The paper identifies these requirements and based on them introduces a protocol extension to enhance HIP’s suitability for application mobility.