Advanced Signaling Support for IP-based Networks

This work develops a set of advanced signaling concepts for IP-based networks. It proposes a design for secure and authentic signaling and provides QoS signaling support for mobile users. Furthermore, this work develops methods which allow for scalable QoS signaling by realizing QoS-based group communication mechanisms and through aggregation of resource reservations

Multimedia delivery in the future internet

The term “Networked Media” implies that all kinds of media including text, image, 3D graphics, audio and video are produced, distributed, shared, managed and consumed on-line through various networks, like the Internet, Fiber, WiFi, WiMAX, GPRS, 3G and so on, in a convergent manner [1]. This white paper is the contribution of the Media Delivery Platform (MDP) cluster and aims to cover the Networked challenges of the Networked Media in the transition to the Future of the Internet. Internet has evolved and changed the way we work and live. End users of the Internet have been confronted with a bewildering range of media, services and applications and of technological innovations concerning media formats, wireless networks, terminal types and capabilities. And there is little evidence that the pace of this innovation is slowing. Today, over one billion of users access the Internet on regular basis, more than 100 million users have downloaded at least one (multi)media file and over 47 millions of them do so regularly, searching in more than 160 Exabytes1 of content. In the near future these numbers are expected to exponentially rise. It is expected that the Internet content will be increased by at least a factor of 6, rising to more than 990 Exabytes before 2012, fuelled mainly by the users themselves. Moreover, it is envisaged that in a near- to mid-term future, the Internet will provide the means to share and distribute (new) multimedia content and services with superior quality and striking flexibility, in a trusted and personalized way, improving citizens’ quality of life, working conditions, edutainment and safety. In this evolving environment, new transport protocols, new multimedia encoding schemes, cross-layer inthe network adaptation, machine-to-machine communication (including RFIDs), rich 3D content as well as community networks and the use of peer-to-peer (P2P) overlays are expected to generate new models of interaction and cooperation, and be able to support enhanced perceived quality-of-experience (PQoE) and innovative applications “on the move”, like virtual collaboration environments, personalised services/ media, virtual sport groups, on-line gaming, edutainment. In this context, the interaction with content combined with interactive/multimedia search capabilities across distributed repositories, opportunistic P2P networks and the dynamic adaptation to the characteristics of diverse mobile terminals are expected to contribute towards such a vision. Based on work that has taken place in a number of EC co-funded projects, in Framework Program 6 (FP6) and Framework Program 7 (FP7), a group of experts and technology visionaries have voluntarily contributed in this white paper aiming to describe the status, the state-of-the art, the challenges and the way ahead in the area of Content Aware media delivery platforms

A QoS-enabled resource management scheme for F-HMIPv6 micro mobility approach

In the near future, wireless networks will certainly run real-time applications with special Quality of Service (QoS) requirements. In this context micro mobility management schemes such as Fast Handovers over Hierarchical Mobile IPv6 (F-HMIPv6) will be a useful tool in reducing Mobile IPv6 (MIPv6) handover disruption and thereby to improve delay and losses. However, F-HMIPv6 alone does not support QoS requirements for real-time applications. Therefore, in order to accomplish this goal, a novel resource management scheme for the Differentiated Services (DiffServ) QoS model is proposed to be used as an add-on to F-HMIPv6. The new resource management scheme combines the F-HMIPv6 functionalities with the DiffServ QoS model and with network congestion control and dynamic reallocation mechanisms in order to accommodate different QoS traffic requirements. This new scheme based on a Measurement-Based Admission Control (MBAC) algorithm is effective, simple, scalable and avoids the well known traditional resource reservation issues such as state maintenance, signaling overhead and processing load. By means of the admission evaluation of new flows and handover flows, it is able to provide the desired QoS requirements for new flows while preserving the QoS of existing ones. The evaluated results show that all QoS metrics analyzed were significantly improved with the new architecture indicating that it is able to provide a highly predictive QoS support to F-HMIPv6

QoS-aware Mobility Management in IP-based Communication Networks

Der allgegenwärtige Zugang zu Informationen, jederzeit und überall, ist ein wichtiges Merkmal künftiger All-IP-Mobilfunktnetze, die verschiedene Systeme miteinander verbinden, dabei dynamischer und flexibler sein werden. Der Einsatz dieser Netze erfordert es jedoch, viele Herausforderungen zu überwinden. Eine der wichtigsten im Rahmen dieser Arbeit, ist die Frage, wie Quality of Service (QoS) Eigenschaften in solchen hoch dynamischen, mobilen Umgebungen zu garantieren sind. Bekanntermaßen beeinflusst die Mobilität von Mobilknoten (MN) die Dienstgüte in mobilen Netzen, da QoS-Parameters für die Ende-zu-Ende-Kommunikation vereinbart werden. Daher müssen Lösungen entwickelt werden, die nahtlose Mobilität, bei gleichzeitigen QoS-Garantien nach Handoffs, unterstützen. Diese Herausforderung ist das Hauptziel der vorliegenden Dissertation, die einen umfassenden Überblick über die bestehenden Mobilitäts- und QoS-Managment-Lösungen in IP-basierten Netzen liefert, gefolgt von einem Einblick in Methoden zur Kopplung von Mobilitätsmanagement und QoS-Lösungen. Nach Betrachtung der Vor- und Nachteile bestehender Ansätze, kommt die Dissertation zu dem Schluss, dass hybride Strategien vielversprechend sind und zu praktikablen Lösungen weiterentwickelt werden können, die sowohl Mobilitäts- als auch QoS-Anforderungen auf effiziente Weise,in allen zukünftigen IP-Mobilfunknetzen erfüllen können. Auf dieser Grundlage schlägt die Dissertation ein neues Hybrid-Protokoll, genannt "QoS-aware Mobile IP Fast Authentication Protocol" (QoMIFA), vor. Unser Vorschlag integriert MIFA als Mobilitäts-Management-Protokoll mit RSVP als QoS Reservierungsprotokoll. MI-FA wird aufgrund seiner Fähigkeit zu schnellen, sicheren und robusten Handoffs gewählt. RSVP hingegen dient als Standardlösung zur Bereitstellung von QoS in bestehenden IP-basierten Netzen. Unter Einhaltung der Hybrid-Architektur wird RSVP um ein neues Objekt, genannt "Mobility Object" erweitert, welches MIFA-Kontrollnachrichten kapselt. Nach der Spezifikation des neuen Vorschlags, bewertet die Dissertation auch seine Leistung im Vergleich zu dem bekannten "Simple QoS Signaling Protocol" (Simple QoS), mittels Simulationsstudien, modelliert mit dem "Network Simluator 2" (NS2). In der Auswertung werden der Einflusses der Netzwerklast und der Geschwindigkeit des Mobilknotens untersucht. Die hierzu verwendeten Leistungsparameter umfassen die Ressourcen-Reservierungs-Latenz, die Anzahl verlorener Pakete pro Handoff, die Anzahl der, vor Abschluss der Reservierung, mit Best-Effort-Eigenschaften übertragenen Pakete pro Handoff und die Wahrscheinlichkeit von Verbindungsabbrüchen. Unsere mittels Simulation erzielten Ergebnisse zeigen, dass QoMIFA schnelle und nahtlose Handoffs mit schneller Ressourcenreservierung nach Handoffs kombinieren kann. Unter Berücksichtigung des Einflusses der Netzwerklast, ist nachweisbar, dass QoMIFA eine besser Leistung als Simple QoS in allen untersuchten Szenarien mit geringer, mittlerer und hoher Last erreicht. Bei Betrachtung des Einflusses der Bewegungsgeschwindigkeit des Mobilknotens auf die Leistung, lassen sich unter beiden Protokollen Ping-Pong-Effekte beobachten, welche zu höheren Ressourcen-Reservierungs-Latenzen, mehr verlorenen Paketen und mehr Best-Effort-Paketen pro Handoff bei geringeren Geschwindigkeiten führen. Der stärkste Einfluss dieser Pinp-Pong-Effekte ist jeweils bei 3 km/h zu beobachten. Allerdings verhält sich QoMIFA unter allen untersuchten Bewegungsgeschwindigkeiten besser als Simple QoS und kann Mobilknoten auch bei hohen Geschwindigkeiten bedienen. In Anschluss an die simulationsgestützte Evaluierung, schätzt die Dissertation die Signalisierungskosten beider Protokolle unter Betrachtung der Kosten für Ortslokalise-rung und Paketzustellung. Im Ergebnis erreicht QoMIFA die zuvor genannten Leistungsverbesserungen auf Kosten von größeren Ortslokalisierungskosten und leicht höherer Paketzustellungskosten.Ubiquitous access to information anywhere, anytime and anyhow is an important feature of future all-IP mobile communication networks, which will interconnect various systems and be more dynamic and flexible. The deployment of these networks, however, requires overcoming many challenges. One of the main challenges of interest for this work is how to provide Qual-ity of Service (QoS) guarantees in such highly dynamic mobile environments.As known, mobility of Mobile Nodes (MNs) affects the QoS in mobile networks since QoS parameters are made for end-to-end communications. Therefore, it is a challenge to develop new solutions capable of supporting seamless mobility while simultaneously providing QoS guarantees after handoffs. Addressing this challenge is the main objective of this dissertation, which provides a comprehensive overview of mobility management solutions and QoS mech-anisms in IP-based networks followed by an insight into how mobility management and QoS solutions can be coupled with each other. Following the highlight of the state of art along with the pros and cons of existing approaches, the dissertation concludes that hybrid strategies are promising and can be further developed to achieve solutions that are capable of simultaneous-ly supporting mobility and QoS, simple from the implementation point of view, efficient and applicable to future all-IP mobile communication networks.Based on this, the dissertation proposes a new hybrid proposal named QoS-aware Mobile IP Fast Authentication Protocol (QoMIFA). Our proposal integrates MIFA as a mobility man-agement protocol with RSVP as a QoS reservation protocol. MIFA is selected due to its capa-bility of the provision of fast, secure and robust handoffs, while RSVP is chosen because it presents the standard solution used to support QoS in existing IP-based networks. The hybrid architecture is retained by introducing a new object, called “mobility object”, to RSVP in or-der to encapsulate MIFA control messages.Following the specification of the new proposal, the dissertation also evaluates its perfor-mance compared to the well-known Simple QoS signaling protocol (Simple QoS) by means of simulation studies modeled using the Network Simulator 2 (NS2). The evaluation compris-es the investigation of the impact of network load and MN speed. The performance measures we are interested in studying comprise the resource reservation latency, number of dropped packets per handoff, number of packets sent as best-effort per handoff until the reservation is accomplished and probability of dropping sessions. Our simulation results show that QoMIFA is capable of achieving fast and smooth handoffs in addition to its capability of quickly re-serving resources after handoffs. Considering the impact of network load, QoMIFA outper-forms Simple QoS in all studied scenarios (low- , middle- and high-loaded scenarios). With respect to the impact of MN speed, it can be observed that the impact of ping-pong effects is seen with both protocols and results in higher resource reservation latency, more dropped packets per handoff and more best-effort packets per handoff at low speeds than at higher ones. The worst impact of ping-pong effects is seen at a speed of 3 km/h when employing QoMIFA and Simple QoS, respectively. However, QoMIFA remains performing significantly better than Simple QoS under all studied MN speeds and can even properly serve MNs mov-ing at high speeds.Following the simulative evaluation, the dissertation estimates the signaling cost of both stud-ied protocols with respect to the location update and packet delivery cost. Our results show that QoMIFA achieves the above mentioned performance improvements at the cost of greater location update cost and slightly higher packet delivery cost than Simple QoS

A Dynamic Service Level Negotiation Mechanism for QoS Provisioning in NGEO Satellite Networks

科研費報告書収録論文(課題番号:17500030/研究代表者:加藤寧/インターネットと高親和性を有する次世代低軌道衛星ネットワークに関する基盤研究

QoS-aware architecture for FHMIP micromobility

Wireless networks will certainly run applications with strict QoS requirements and so, micro-mobility protocols such as fast hierarchical mobile IPv6 (FHMIP) are useful tools to accomplish this new feature. The FHMIP is an effective scheme to reduce Mobile IPv6 handover disruption, however it does not support application's QoS requirements. Therefore, in order to provide QoS guarantees for real-time applications it is necessary to develop new traffic management schemes; this implies the optimization of network mobility support and also some network congestion control. A traffic management scheme of this type should take into account the QoS requirements of handover users and should implement a resource management (RM) scheme in order to achieve this. In this paper, a new RM scheme for the DiffServ QoS model is proposed. This new scheme is implemented by access routers as an extension to FHMIP micromobility protocol. In order to prevent QoS degradation of the existing traffic, access routers should evaluate the impact of admitting a new mobile node (MN), previously to the handover. This evaluation and sequent decision on wether admitting or refusing MN's traffic is based on a measurement-based admission control (MBAC) algorithm. This architecture, that has been implemented and tested using ns-2, includes a simple signaling protocol, a traffic descriptor and exhibits an adaptive behavior to traffic QoS requirements. All the necessary measurements are aggregated by class-of-service, thus avoiding maintaining state on the individual flows.(undefined

A QoS-enable solution for mobile environments

This paper addresses the problem of designing a suitable Quality of Service (QoS) solution for mobile environments. The proposed solution deploys a dynamic QoS provisioning scheme able to deal with service protection during node mobility within a local domain, presenting extensions to deal with global mobility. The dynamic QoS provisioning encompasses a QoS architecture that uses explicit and implicit setup mechanisms to request resources from the network for the purpose of supporting control plane functions and optimizing resource allocation. Abstract--- For efficient resource allocation, the resource and mobility management schemes have been coupled resulting in a QoS/Mobility aware network architecture able to react proactively to mobility events. Both management schemes have been optimized to work together, in order to support seamless handovers for mobile users running real-time applications. Abstract--- The analysis of performance improvement and the model parametrization of the proposed solution have been evaluated using simulation. Simulation results show that the solution avoids network congestion and also the starvation of less priority DiffServ classes. Moreover, the results also show that bandwidth utilization for priority classes is levered and that the QoS offered to Mobile Node's (MN's) applications, within each DiffServ class, is maintained in spite of MN mobility. Abstract--- The proposed model is simple, easy to implement and takes into account the mobile Internet requirements. Simulation results show that this new methodology is effective and able to provide QoS services adapted to application requests

A QoS-aware architecture for mobile internet

Tese de doutoramento InformáticaHoje em dia, as pessoas pretendem ter simultaneamente mobilidade, qualidade de serviço e estar sempre connectados à Internet. No intuito, de satisfazer estes clientes muito exigentes, os mercados das telecomunicações estão a impor novos e dificeis desafios às redes móveis, através da demanda, de heterogeneidade em termos de tecnologias de acesso rádio, novos serviços, niveis de qualidade de serviço adequados aos requisitos das aplicações de tempo real, elevada taxa de utilização do recursos disponiveis e melhor capacidade de desempenho. A Internet foi concebida para fornecer serviços sem qualquer tipo de garantias de qualidade às aplicações, apenas se comprometendo em oferecer o melhor serviço possível. No entanto, nos útlimos anos diversos esforços foram levados a cabo no sentido de dotar a Internet com o suporte à qualidade de serviço. Dos esforços desenvolvidos resultaram dois paradigmas para o suporte da qualidade de serviço: o modelo de Serviços Integrados (Integrated Services - IntServ) e o modelo de Serviços Diferenciados (Differentiated Services - DiffServ). Todavia, estes modelos de qualidade de serviço (QoS) foram concebido antes da existência da Internet móvel, portanto o desenvolvimento destes modelos não teve em consideração a questão da mobilidade. Por outro lado, o protocolo padrão actual para a Internet móvel, o MIPv6, revela algumas limitações nos cenários onde os utilizadores estão constantemente a moverem-se para outros pontos de acesso. Neste tipo de cenários, o MIPv6 introduz tempos de latência que não são sustentáveis para aplicações com requisitos de QoS mais restritos. Os factos revelados, demonstram que existe uma emergente necessidade de adaptar o actual protocolo de mobilidade, e também de adaptar os modelos de QoS, ou então criar modelos alternativos de QoS, para satisfazer às exigências do utilizador de hoje de redes móveis. Para alcançar este objectivo o presente trabalho propõe melhorias no sistema de gestão da mobilidade do protocolo MIPv6 e na gestão de recursos do modelo DiffServ. O MIPv6 foi melhorado para os cenários de micro-mobilidade com a abordagem para micro-mobilidade do F-HMIPv6. Enquanto que, o modelo DiffServ foi melhorado para os ambientes móveis com funcionalidades dinâmicas e adaptativas através da utilização de sinalização de QoS e da gestão distribuida dos recursos. A gestão da mobilidade e dos recursos foi também acoplada na solução proposta com o propósito de optimizar a utilização dos recursos num meio onde os recursos são tipicamente escassos. O modelo proposto é simples, é de fácil implementação, tem em consideração os requisitos da Internet móvel, e provou ser eficiente e capaz de fornecer serviços com QoS de elevada fiabilidade às aplicações.Over the last few years, several network communication challenges have arisen as a result of the growing number of users demanding Quality of Service (QoS) and mobility simultaneously. In order to satisfy these very demanding customers, the markets are imposing new challenges to wireless networks by demanding heterogeneity in terms of wireless access technologies, new services, suited QoS levels to real-time applications, high usability and improved performance. However, the Internet has been designed for providing application services without quality guarantees. That explains why, in the last years several efforts have been made to endow Internet with QoS support. From the developed efforts have resulted two QoS paradigms: Integrated Services (IntServ) which offers the guaranteed service model and the Differentiated Services (DiffServ) which offers the predictive service model. Although these QoS models have been designed before the existence of mobile Internet, so they do not consider the mobility issue. For instance, the guaranteed service model requires that whenever a Mobile Node (MN) wants to move to a new location, the allocated resources in the old path must be released and a new resource reservation in a new path must be made, resulting in extra signaling overhead, heavy processing and state load. Therefore, if handovers are frequent, large mobility and QoS signaling messages will be created in the access networks. Consequently, significant scalability problems may arise with this type of service model. The predicted service model, on the other hand, requires an additional features such as dynamic and adaptive resource management in order to be efficient in a very dynamic network such as a mobile network. A QoS solution for mobile environments must provide the capacity to adapt its resource utilization to a changeable nature of wireless networks because they have a more dynamic behavior due to incoming or outgoing handovers. For this reason, a QoS signalization for dynamic resource provisioning is necessary in order to supply adequate QoS levels to mobile users. On the other hand, the current standard protocol for mobile Internet, Mobile IPv6 (MIPv6), reveals limitations in scenarios where users are constantly moving to another point of attachment. In these situations, MIPv6 introduces latency times that are not sustainable for applications with strict QoS requirements. All things considered, reveal the emerging need to adapt the current standard mobility protocol and QoS models to satisfy today’s mobile user’s requirements. To accomplish this goal, the present work proposes enhancements in terms of the MIPv6 protocol mobility management scheme as well as in DiffServ QoS model resource management. The former was enhanced for micro-mobility scenarios with a specific combination of FMIPv6 (Fast Mobile IPv6) and HMIPv6 (Hierarchical Mobile IPv6) protocols. Whereas, the latter was enhanced for mobile environments with dynamic and adaptive features by using QoS signalization as well as distributed resource management. The mobility and resource management has also been coupled in the proposed solution with the objective of optimizing the resource utilization in a environment where resources are typically scarce. In order to assess model performance as well as its parametrization, a simulation model has been designed and implemented in the Network Simulator version two (NS-2). The model´s performance evaluation has been conducted based on the respective data acquired from statistical analysis in order to validate and consolidate the conclusions. Simulation results indicate that the solution avoids network congestion and starvation of less priority DiffServ classes. Moreover, the results also indicate that bandwidth utilization for priority classes increases and the QoS offered to MN’s applications, in each DiffServ class, remains unchangeable with MN mobility. The proposed model is simple and easy to implement. It considers mobile Internet requirements and has proven to be effective and capable of providing services with highly reliable QoS to mobile applications.Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (FCT) - Bolsa SFRH/BD/35245/200

Acesso banda larga sem fios em ambientes heterogéneos de próxima geração

Doutoramento em Engenharia InformáticaO acesso ubíquo à Internet é um dos principais desafios para os operadores de telecomunicações na próxima década. O número de utilizadores da Internet está a crescer exponencialmente e o paradigma de acesso "always connected, anytime, anywhere" é um requisito fundamental para as redes móveis de próxima geração. A tecnologia WiMAX, juntamente com o LTE, foi recentemente reconhecida pelo ITU como uma das tecnologias de acesso compatíveis com os requisitos do 4G. Ainda assim, esta tecnologia de acesso não está completamente preparada para ambientes de próxima geração, principalmente devido à falta de mecanismos de cross-layer para integração de QoS e mobilidade. Adicionalmente, para além das tecnologias WiMAX e LTE, as tecnologias de acesso rádio UMTS/HSPA e Wi-Fi continuarão a ter um impacto significativo nas comunicações móveis durante os próximos anos. Deste modo, é fundamental garantir a coexistência das várias tecnologias de acesso rádio em termos de QoS e mobilidade, permitindo assim a entrega de serviços multimédia de tempo real em redes móveis. Para garantir a entrega de serviços multimédia a utilizadores WiMAX, esta Tese propõe um gestor cross-layer WiMAX integrado com uma arquitectura de QoS fim-a-fim. A arquitectura apresentada permite o controlo de QoS e a comunicação bidireccional entre o sistema WiMAX e as entidades das camadas superiores. Para além disso, o gestor de cross-layer proposto é estendido com eventos e comandos genéricos e independentes da tecnologia para optimizar os procedimentos de mobilidade em ambientes WiMAX. Foram realizados testes para avaliar o desempenho dos procedimentos de QoS e mobilidade da arquitectura WiMAX definida, demonstrando que esta é perfeitamente capaz de entregar serviços de tempo real sem introduzir custos excessivos na rede. No seguimento das extensões de QoS e mobilidade apresentadas para a tecnologia WiMAX, o âmbito desta Tese foi alargado para ambientes de acesso sem-fios heterogéneos. Neste sentido, é proposta uma arquitectura de mobilidade transparente com suporte de QoS para redes de acesso multitecnologia. A arquitectura apresentada integra uma versão estendida do IEEE 802.21 com suporte de QoS, bem como um gestor de mobilidade avançado integrado com os protocolos de gestão de mobilidade do nível IP. Finalmente, para completar o trabalho desenvolvido no âmbito desta Tese, é proposta uma extensão aos procedimentos de decisão de mobilidade em ambientes heterogéneos para incorporar a informação de contexto da rede e do terminal. Para validar e avaliar as optimizações propostas, foram desenvolvidos testes de desempenho num demonstrador inter-tecnologia, composta pelas redes de acesso WiMAX, Wi-Fi e UMTS/HSPA.Ubiquitous Internet access is one of the main challenges for the telecommunications industry in the next decade. The number of users accessing the Internet is growing exponentially and the network access paradigm of “always connected, anytime, anywhere” is a central requirement for the so-called Next Generation Mobile Networks (NGMN). WiMAX, together with LTE, was recently recognized by ITU as one of the compliant access technologies for 4G. Nevertheless, WiMAX is not yet fully prepared for next generation environments, mainly due to the lack of QoS and mobility crosslayer procedures to support real-time multimedia services delivery. Furthermore, besides the 4G compliant WiMAX and LTE radio access technologies, UMTS/HSPA and Wi-Fi will also have a significant impact in the mobile communications during the next years. Therefore, it is fundamental to ensure the coexistence of multiple radio access technologies in what QoS and mobility procedures are concerned, thereby allowing the delivery of real-time services in mobile networks. In order to provide the WiMAX mobile users with the demanded multimedia services, it is proposed in this Thesis a WiMAX cross-layer manager integrated in an end-to-end all-IP QoS enabled architecture. The presented framework enables the QoS control and bidirectional communication between WiMAX and the upper layer network entities. Furthermore, the proposed cross-layer framework is extended with media independent events and commands to optimize the mobility procedures in WiMAX environments. Tests were made to evaluate the QoS and mobility performance of the defined architecture, demonstrating that it is perfectly capable of handling and supporting real time services without introducing an excessive cost in the network. Following the QoS and mobility extensions provided for WiMAX, the scope of this Thesis is broaden and a seamless mobility architecture with QoS support in heterogeneous wireless access environments is proposed. The presented architecture integrates an extended version of the IEEE 802.21 framework with QoS support, as well as an advanced mobility manager integrated with the IP level mobility management protocols. Finally, to complete the work within the framework of this Thesis, it is proposed an extension to the handover decisionmaking processes in heterogeneous access environments through the integration of context information from both the network entities and the enduser. Performance tests were developed in a real testbed to validate the proposed optimizations in an inter-technology handover scenario involving WiMAX, Wi-Fi and UMTS/HSPA