Mobile IP: state of the art report

Due to roaming, a mobile device may change its network attachment each time it moves to a new link. This might cause a disruption for the Internet data packets that have to reach the mobile node. Mobile IP is a protocol, developed by the Mobile IP Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) working group, that is able to inform the network about this change in network attachment such that the Internet data packets will be delivered in a seamless way to the new point of attachment. This document presents current developments and research activities in the Mobile IP area

Content source selection in Bluetooth networks

Large scale market penetration of electronic devices equipped with Bluetooth technology now gives the ability to share content (such as music or video clips) between members of the public in a decentralised manner. Achieved using opportunistic connections, formed when they are colocated, in environments where Internet connectivity is expensive or unreliable, such as urban buses, train rides and coffee shops. Most people have a high degree of regularity in their movements (such as a daily commute), including repeated contacts with others possessing similar seasonal movement patterns. We argue that this behaviour can be exploited in connection selection, and outline a system for the identification of long-term companions and sources that have previously provided quality content, in order to maximise the successful receipt of content files. We utilise actual traces and existing mobility models to validate our approach, and show how consideration of the colocation history and the quality of previous data transfers leads to more successful sharing of content in realistic scenarios

User-Relative Names for Globally Connected Personal Devices

Nontechnical users who own increasingly ubiquitous network-enabled personal devices such as laptops, digital cameras, and smart phones need a simple, intuitive, and secure way to share information and services between their devices. User Information Architecture, or UIA, is a novel naming and peer-to-peer connectivity architecture addressing this need. Users assign UIA names by "introducing" devices to each other on a common local-area network, but these names remain securely bound to their target as devices migrate. Multiple devices owned by the same user, once introduced, automatically merge their namespaces to form a distributed "personal cluster" that the owner can access or modify from any of his devices. Instead of requiring users to allocate globally unique names from a central authority, UIA enables users to assign their own "user-relative" names both to their own devices and to other users. With UIA, for example, Alice can always access her iPod from any of her own personal devices at any location via the name "ipod", and her friend Bob can access her iPod via a relative name like "ipod.Alice".Comment: 7 pages, 1 figure, 1 tabl

MADServer: An Architecture for Opportunistic Mobile Advanced Delivery

Rapid increases in cellular data traffic demand creative alternative delivery vectors for data. Despite the conceptual attractiveness of mobile data offloading, no concrete web server architectures integrate intelligent offloading in a production-ready and easily deployable manner without relying on vast infrastructural changes to carriers’ networks. Delay-tolerant networking technology offers the means to do just this. We introduce MADServer, a novel DTN-based architecture for mobile data offloading that splits web con- tent among multiple independent delivery vectors based on user and data context. It enables intelligent data offload- ing, caching, and querying solutions which can be incorporated in a manner that still satisfies user expectations for timely delivery. At the same time, it allows for users who have poor or expensive connections to the cellular network to leverage multi-hop opportunistic routing to send and receive data. We also present a preliminary implementation of MADServer and provide real-world performance evaluations

Bringing Context-Awareness to Applications in Ad Hoc Mobile Networks

Context-aware mobile applications require constant adapta-tion to their changing environments. Technological advancements have increased the pervasiveness of mobile computing devices such as laptops, handhelds, cellular phones, and embedded sensors. The sheer amount of context information necessary for adaptation places a heightened burden on application developers as they must manage and utilize vast amounts of data from diverse sources. Facilitating programming in this data-rich environment requires a middleware infrastructure for sensing, collect-ing, and providing context information to applications. In this paper, we demonstrate the feasibility of providing such a middleware that allows programmers to focus on high-level interactions among programs and to employ declarative abstract specifications of context in settings that exhibit high levels of mobility and transient interactions with opportunis-tically encountered components. We also discuss the novel context-aware abstractions the middleware provides and the programming knowledge necessary to write applications using our middleware. Finally, we provide examples demonstrating the flexibility of the infrastructure and its abil-ity to support differing tasks from a wide variety of application domains