This paper presents a quantitative methodology and results comparing different approaches for location-independent communication. Our approach is empirical and is based on real Internet topologies, routing tables from real routers, and a measured workload of the mobility of devices and content across network addresses today. We measure the extent of network mobility exhibited by mobile devices with a homebrewed Android app deployed on hundreds of smartphones, and measure the network mobility of

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... Internet content from distributed vantage points. We combine this measured data with our quantitative methodology to analyze the different cost-benefit tradeoffs struck by location-independent network architectures with respect to routing update cost, path stretch, and forwarding table size. We find that more than 20% of users change over 10 IP addresses a day, suggesting that mobility is the norm rather than the exception, so intrinsic and efficient network support for mobility is critical. We also find that with purely name-based routing approaches, each event involving the mobility of a device or popular content may result in an update at up to 14% of Internet routers; but, the fraction of impacted routers is much smaller for the long tail of unpopular content. These results suggest that recent proposals for pure name-based networking may be suitable for highly aggregateable content that moves infrequently but may need to be augmented with addressing-assisted approaches to handle device mobility.