Smart PIN: performance and cost-oriented context-aware personal information network

The next generation of networks will involve interconnection of heterogeneous individual networks such as WPAN, WLAN, WMAN and Cellular network, adopting the IP as common infrastructural protocol and providing virtually always-connected network. Furthermore, there are many devices which enable easy acquisition and storage of information as pictures, movies, emails, etc. Therefore, the information overload and divergent content’s characteristics make it difficult for users to handle their data in manual way. Consequently, there is a need for personalised automatic services which would enable data exchange across heterogeneous network and devices. To support these personalised services, user centric approaches for data delivery across the heterogeneous network are also required. In this context, this thesis proposes Smart PIN - a novel performance and cost-oriented context-aware Personal Information Network. Smart PIN's architecture is detailed including its network, service and management components. Within the service component, two novel schemes for efficient delivery of context and content data are proposed: Multimedia Data Replication Scheme (MDRS) and Quality-oriented Algorithm for Multiple-source Multimedia Delivery (QAMMD). MDRS supports efficient data accessibility among distributed devices using data replication which is based on a utility function and a minimum data set. QAMMD employs a buffer underflow avoidance scheme for streaming, which achieves high multimedia quality without content adaptation to network conditions. Simulation models for MDRS and QAMMD were built which are based on various heterogeneous network scenarios. Additionally a multiple-source streaming based on QAMMS was implemented as a prototype and tested in an emulated network environment. Comparative tests show that MDRS and QAMMD perform significantly better than other approaches

The Road Ahead for Networking: A Survey on ICN-IP Coexistence Solutions

In recent years, the current Internet has experienced an unexpected paradigm shift in the usage model, which has pushed researchers towards the design of the Information-Centric Networking (ICN) paradigm as a possible replacement of the existing architecture. Even though both Academia and Industry have investigated the feasibility and effectiveness of ICN, achieving the complete replacement of the Internet Protocol (IP) is a challenging task. Some research groups have already addressed the coexistence by designing their own architectures, but none of those is the final solution to move towards the future Internet considering the unaltered state of the networking. To design such architecture, the research community needs now a comprehensive overview of the existing solutions that have so far addressed the coexistence. The purpose of this paper is to reach this goal by providing the first comprehensive survey and classification of the coexistence architectures according to their features (i.e., deployment approach, deployment scenarios, addressed coexistence requirements and architecture or technology used) and evaluation parameters (i.e., challenges emerging during the deployment and the runtime behaviour of an architecture). We believe that this paper will finally fill the gap required for moving towards the design of the final coexistence architecture.Comment: 23 pages, 16 figures, 3 table

Mobility Management in beyond 3G-Environments

Beyond 3G-environments are typically defined as environments that integrate different wireless and fixed access network technologies. In this paper, we address IP based Mobility Management (MM) in beyond 3G-environments with a focus on wireless access networks, motivated by the current trend of WiFi, GPRS, and UMTS networks. The GPRS and UMTS networks provide countrywide network access, while the WiFi networks provide network access in local areas such as city centres and airports. As a result, mobile end-users can be always on-line and connected to their preferred network(s), these network preferences are typically stored in a user profile. For example, an end-user who wishes to be connected with highest bandwidth could be connected to a WiFi network when available and fall back to GPRS when moving outside the hotspot area.\ud In this paper, we consider a combination of MM for legacy services (like web browsing, telnet, etc.) using Mobile IP and multimedia services using SIP. We assume that the end-user makes use of multi-interface terminals with the capability of selecting one or more types of access networks\ud based on preferences. For multimedia sessions, like VoIP or streaming video, we distinguish between changes in network access when the end-user is in a session or not in a session. If the end-user is not in a session, he or she needs to be able to start new sessions and receive invitations for new sessions. If the end-user is in a session, the session needs to be handed over to the new access network as seamless as possible from the perspective of the end-user. We propose an integrated but flexible solution to these problems that facilitates MM with a customizable transparency to applications and end-users

Multinet : enabler for next generation enterprise wireless services

Wireless communications are currently experiencing a fast migration toward the beyond third-generation (B3G)/fourth generation (4G) era. This represents a generational change in wireless systems: new capabilities related to mobility and new services support is required and new concepts as individual-centric, user-centric or ambient-aware communications are included. One of the main restrictions associated to wireless technology is mobility management, this feature was not considered in the design phase; for this reason, a complete solution is not already found, although different solutions are proposed and are being proposed. In MULTINET project, features as mobility and multihoming are applied to wireless network to provide the necessary network and application functionality enhancements for seamless data communication mobility considering end-user scenario and preferences. The aim of this paper is to show the benefits of these functionalities from the Service Providers and final User point of view