A Survey on Handover Management in Mobility Architectures

This work presents a comprehensive and structured taxonomy of available techniques for managing the handover process in mobility architectures. Representative works from the existing literature have been divided into appropriate categories, based on their ability to support horizontal handovers, vertical handovers and multihoming. We describe approaches designed to work on the current Internet (i.e. IPv4-based networks), as well as those that have been devised for the "future" Internet (e.g. IPv6-based networks and extensions). Quantitative measures and qualitative indicators are also presented and used to evaluate and compare the examined approaches. This critical review provides some valuable guidelines and suggestions for designing and developing mobility architectures, including some practical expedients (e.g. those required in the current Internet environment), aimed to cope with the presence of NAT/firewalls and to provide support to legacy systems and several communication protocols working at the application layer

FastM: Design and Evaluation of a Fast Mobility Mechanism for Wireless Mesh Networks

Although there is a large volume of work in the literature in terms of mobility approaches for Wireless Mesh Networks, usually these approaches introduce high latency in the handover process and do not support realtime services and applications. Moreover, mobility is decoupled from routing, which leads to inefficiency to both mobility and routing approaches with respect to mobility. In this paper we present a new extension to proactive routing protocols using a fast mobility extension, FastM, with the purpose of increasing handover performance in Wireless Mesh Networks. With this new extension, a new concept is created to integrate information between neighbor wireless mesh routers, managing locations of clients associated to wireless mesh routers in a certain neighborhood, and avoiding packet loss during handover. The proposed mobility approach is able to optimize the handover process without imposing any modifications to the current IEE 802.11 MAC protocol and use unmodified clients. Results show the improved efficiency of the proposed scheme: metrics such as disconnection time, throughput, packet loss and control overhead are largely improved when compared to previous approaches. Moreover, these conclusions apply to mobility scenarios, although mobility decreases the performance of the handover approach, as expected

Seamless Infrastructure independent Multi Homed NEMO Handoff Using Effective and Timely IEEE 802.21 MIH triggers

Handoff performance of NEMO BS protocol with existent improvement proposals is still not sufficient for real time and QoS-sensitive applications and further optimizations are needed. When dealing with single homed NEMO, handoff latency and packet loss become irreducible all optimizations included, so that it is impossible to meet requirements of the above applications. Then, How to combine the different Fast handoff approaches remains an open research issue and needs more investigation. In this paper, we propose a new Infrastructure independent handoff approach combining multihoming and intelligent Make-Before-Break Handoff. Based on required Handoff time estimation, L2 and L3 handoffs are initiated using effective and timely MIH triggers, reducing so the anticipation time and increasing the probability of prediction. We extend MIH services to provide tunnel establishment and switching before link break. Thus, the handoff is performed in background with no latency and no packet loss while pingpong scenario is almost avoided. In addition, our proposal saves cost and power consumption by optimizing the time of simultaneous use of multiple interfaces. We provide also NS2 simulation experiments identifying suitable parameter values used for estimation and validating the proposed mode

Enabling Mobile Service Continuity across Orchestrated Edge Networks

Edge networking has become an important technology for providing low-latency services to end users. However, deploying an edge network does not guarantee continuous service for mobile users. Mobility can cause frequent interruptions and network delays as users leave the initial serving edge. In this paper, we propose a solution to provide transparent service continuity for mobile users in large-scale WiFi networks. The contribution of this work has three parts. First, we propose ARNAB architecture to achieve mobile service continuity. The term ARNAB means rabbit in Arabic, which represents an Architecture for Transparent Service Continuity via Double-tier Migration. The first tier migrates user connectivity, while the second tier migrates user containerized applications. ARNAB provides mobile services just like rabbits hop through the WiFi infrastructure. Second, we identify the root-causes for prolonged container migration downtime. Finally, we enhance the container migration scheme by improving system response time. Our experimental results show that the downtime of ARNAB container migration solution is 50% shorter than that of the state-of-the-art migration.This work has been partially funded by the H2020 Europe/Taiwan joint action 5G-DIVE (Grant #859881) and also partially funded by the Ministry of Science and Technology, under the Grant Number MOST 108-2634-F-009-006 - through Pervasive Artificial Intelligence Research (PAIR) Labs, Taiwan

An intelligent path management in heterogeneous vehicular networks

Achieving reliable connectivity in heterogeneous vehicular networks is a challenging task, owing to rapid topological changes and unpredictable vehicle speeds. As vehicular communication demands continue to evolve, multipath connectivity is emerging as an important tool, which promises to enhance network interoperability and reliability. Given the limited coverage area of serving access technologies, frequent disconnections are to be expected as the vehicle moves. To ensure seamless communication in dynamic vehicular environments, an intelligent path management algorithm for Multipath TCP (MPTCP) has been proposed. The algorithm utilizes a network selection mechanism based on Fuzzy Analytic Hierarchy Process (FAHP), which dynamically assigns the most appropriate underlying network for each running application. The selection process takes into account multiple factors, such as path quality, vehicle mobility, and service characteristics. In contrast to existing solutions, our proposed method offers a dynamic and comprehensive approach to network selection that is tailored to the specific needs of each service to ensure that it is always paired with the optimal access technology. The results of the evaluation demonstrate that the proposed method is highly effective in maintaining service continuity during vertical handover. By tailoring the network selection to the specific needs of each application, our path manager is able to ensure optimal connectivity and performance, even in challenging vehicular environments, delivering a better user experience, with more reliable connections, and smoother data transfers.FCT - Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia(PD/BDE/150506/2019