Localhost HTTP proxy for mobility and location based services support

Abstract

When TCP/IP was originally designed, location awareness and terminal mobility was not taken into consideration. IPv4 has a limited IP address space and IP addresses itself have no proximity relation. The IP address limitation will eventually be overcome by the introduction of IPv6, but most of the huge already deployed infrastructure for mobile Internet Access use private IP addresses and Network Address Translation (NAT) to solve the problem. This in turn inhibits the deployment of Mobile IP which would be needed for seamless handover between networks. The confinements due to NAT are usually countered by establishing tunnels from the inside-NAT devices to an outside endpoint. However, quite a few mobile access points don’t support tunneling - either for security reasons or caused by design. A multitude of intra-network handover proce-dures are known, few also support inter-network handover. Standards like UMA require both cross-network agreements and software modify-cations to the mobile devices whereas the solution proposed in this paper only requires application layer access to the networks.