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In distributed computing, location transparency—the decoupling of objects from their physical location—is desirable in that it can simplify application development and enables efficient resource allocation. Many systems for location transparency are built on TCP/IP. We argue that addressing mobile objects in terms of temporary hosts may not be the best design decision. Object migration makes it necessary to use dedicated routing infrastructures, e.g., location servers, to deliver inter-object messages. This incurs high costs in terms of complexity, overhead, and latency. Here, we defer object overlay routing to a networking layer, by replacing TCP/IP with a location-independent routing scheme which directs messages to destinations determined by flat identifiers instead of IP addresses. Consequently, messages are delivered directly to objects, instead of possibly out-of-date locations. We explore the scheme …