Context-Awareness Enhances 5G Multi-Access Edge Computing Reliability

The fifth generation (5G) mobile telecommunication network is expected to support Multi- Access Edge Computing (MEC), which intends to distribute computation tasks and services from the central cloud to the edge clouds. Towards ultra-responsive, ultra-reliable and ultra-low-latency MEC services, the current mobile network security architecture should enable a more decentralized approach for authentication and authorization processes. This paper proposes a novel decentralized authentication architecture that supports flexible and low-cost local authentication with the awareness of context information of network elements such as user equipment and virtual network functions. Based on a Markov model for backhaul link quality, as well as a random walk mobility model with mixed mobility classes and traffic scenarios, numerical simulations have demonstrated that the proposed approach is able to achieve a flexible balance between the network operating cost and the MEC reliability.Comment: Accepted by IEEE Access on Feb. 02, 201

Integrated Support for Handoff Management and Context-Awareness in Heterogeneous Wireless Networks

The overwhelming success of mobile devices and wireless communications is stressing the need for the development of mobility-aware services. Device mobility requires services adapting their behavior to sudden context changes and being aware of handoffs, which introduce unpredictable delays and intermittent discontinuities. Heterogeneity of wireless technologies (Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, 3G) complicates the situation, since a different treatment of context-awareness and handoffs is required for each solution. This paper presents a middleware architecture designed to ease mobility-aware service development. The architecture hides technology-specific mechanisms and offers a set of facilities for context awareness and handoff management. The architecture prototype works with Bluetooth and Wi-Fi, which today represent two of the most widespread wireless technologies. In addition, the paper discusses motivations and design details in the challenging context of mobile multimedia streaming applications

Efficient Micro-Mobility using Intra-domain Multicast-based Mechanisms (M&M)

One of the most important metrics in the design of IP mobility protocols is the handover performance. The current Mobile IP (MIP) standard has been shown to exhibit poor handover performance. Most other work attempts to modify MIP to slightly improve its efficiency, while others propose complex techniques to replace MIP. Rather than taking these approaches, we instead propose a new architecture for providing efficient and smooth handover, while being able to co-exist and inter-operate with other technologies. Specifically, we propose an intra-domain multicast-based mobility architecture, where a visiting mobile is assigned a multicast address to use while moving within a domain. Efficient handover is achieved using standard multicast join/prune mechanisms. Two approaches are proposed and contrasted. The first introduces the concept proxy-based mobility, while the other uses algorithmic mapping to obtain the multicast address of visiting mobiles. We show that the algorithmic mapping approach has several advantages over the proxy approach, and provide mechanisms to support it. Network simulation (using NS-2) is used to evaluate our scheme and compare it to other routing-based micro-mobility schemes - CIP and HAWAII. The proactive handover results show that both M&M and CIP shows low handoff delay and packet reordering depth as compared to HAWAII. The reason for M&M's comparable performance with CIP is that both use bi-cast in proactive handover. The M&M, however, handles multiple border routers in a domain, where CIP fails. We also provide a handover algorithm leveraging the proactive path setup capability of M&M, which is expected to outperform CIP in case of reactive handover.Comment: 12 pages, 11 figure

Seamless roaming and guaranteed communication using a synchronized single-hop multi-gateway 802.15.4e TSCH network

Industrial wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are being used to improve the efficiency, productivity and safety of industrial processes. An open standard that is commonly used in such cases is IEEE 802.15.4e. Its TSCH mode employs a time synchronized based MAC scheme together with channel hopping to alleviate the impact of channel fading. Until now, most of the industrial WSNs have been designed to only support static nodes and are not able to deal with mobility. In this paper, we show how a single-hop, multi-gateway IEEE 802.15.4e TSCH network architecture can tackle the mobility problem. We introduce the Virtual Grand Master (VGM) concept that moves the synchronization point from separated Backbone Border Routers (BBRs) towards the backbone network. With time synchronization of all BBRs, mobile nodes can roam from one BBR to another without time desynchronization. In addition to time synchronization, we introduce a mechanism to synchronize the schedules between BBRs to support fast handover of mobile nodes.Comment: Short paper version of a paper submitted to Ad-Hoc Networks Journal by Elsevie