MIPv4 BOF review

[Eric Rescorla <ekr@rtfm.com>]

WARNING: I don't really track MIP, so uninformed outsider comments
ahead.

MIPv4 is one of the WGs in the new Mobile IP area.  The idea seems to
be to break up all the different pieces of the mobile effort in the
hope that we can make forward progress on one of them. This particular
BOF was targeted towards IPv4. 

List of things to work on:
(1) Interoperability
(2) Progress the Mobile IPv4 spec to Draft.
(3) AAA key exchange for Mobile IP.
(4) AAA NAI completion and MIPv4 AAA review
(5) Dynamic HA assignment discussion
(6) BPN solution for MIPv4 depletion

The first 30 minutes was mostly random stuff being thrown out
as "things that this group might also work on". It was mostly
beaten back.

This is actually more of a WG than a BOF, since it's a spin-off
of MIP.

The VPN solution draft was presented. This is really fiendishly
complicated and has given me an enormous headache. Perkins seems to
agree. Allegedly Radia is going to do a security review. I hope she
has enough coffee. This system seems to be designed to allow
a bunch of really complicated topologies. Do we need all
of these topologies? I don't know.

Kent Leung presented draft-kulkarni-mobileip-dynamic-assignment-01.txt,
which seems to be an optimization to allow you to pick out a closer
home agent than you otherwise would. I guess this is useful
if you don't have shortcut routing. If you do, you're presumably
just saving time on signalling traffic. Is that worthwhile?

Like I say, I'm an outsider to MIP, but I'd be curious to know
what the ratio of vendor effort to actual deployment is. A lot
of this seems to have the flavor of "maybe if we just add this
one final feature the public will want our stuff".

[Missed some stuff in the middle cause I was at APPS]

There's the usual discussion at the end of what the WG should
look like, designing the charter, whatever. Worries about
mission creep.

What I don't understand here is: what are the BIG obstacles to
MIPv4 being deployed. Let's kill them. If that's what this
WG is supposed to do, then I'm all for it. If that's the idea
here--which I think it is--then I'm all in favor of it.