Architectural and mobility management designs in internet-based infrastructure wireless mesh networks

Wireless mesh networks (WMNs) have recently emerged to be a cost-effective solution to support large-scale wireless Internet access. They have numerous ap- plications, such as broadband Internet access, building automation, and intelligent transportation systems. One research challenge for Internet-based WMNs is to design efficient mobility management techniques for mobile users to achieve seamless roam- ing. Mobility management includes handoff management and location management. The objective of this research is to design new handoff and location management techniques for Internet-based infrastructure WMNs. Handoff management enables a wireless network to maintain active connections as mobile users move into new service areas. Previous solutions on handoff manage- ment in infrastructure WMNs mainly focus on intra-gateway mobility. New handoff issues involved in inter-gateway mobility in WMNs have not been properly addressed. Hence, a new architectural design is proposed to facilitate inter-gateway handoff man- agement in infrastructure WMNs. The proposed architecture is designed to specifi- cally address the special handoff design challenges in Internet-based WMNs. It can facilitate parallel executions of handoffs from multiple layers, in conjunction with a data caching mechanism which guarantees minimum packet loss during handoffs. Based on the proposed architecture, a Quality of Service (QoS) handoff mechanism is also proposed to achieve QoS requirements for both handoff and existing traffic before and after handoffs in the inter-gateway WMN environment. Location management in wireless networks serves the purpose of tracking mobile users and locating them prior to establishing new communications. Existing location management solutions proposed for single-hop wireless networks cannot be directly applied to Internet-based WMNs. Hence, a dynamic location management framework in Internet-based WMNs is proposed that can guarantee the location management performance and also minimize the protocol overhead. In addition, a novel resilient location area design in Internet-based WMNs is also proposed. The formation of the location areas can adapt to the changes of both paging load and service load so that the tradeoff between paging overhead and mobile device power consumption can be balanced, and at the same time, the required QoS performance of existing traffic is maintained. Therefore, together with the proposed handoff management design, efficient mobility management can be realized in Internet-based infrastructure WMNs

Context storage using NoSQL

With the ubiquity and pervasiveness of mobile computing, together with the increasing number of social networks, end-users have learned to live and share all kinds of information about themselves. As an example, Facebook reports that it has currently 500 million active users, 200 million of which access its services on mobile systems; moreover, users that access Facebook through mobile applications are twice as active as non-mobile users, and it is used by 200 mobile operators in 60 countries [1]. More specific mobile platforms such as Foursquare, which unlike Facebook only collects location information, reports 6.5 million users worldwide, and also has a mobile presence (both with a web application and iPhone / Android applications) [2]. Context- aware architectures intend to explore this increasing number of context information sources and provide richer, targeted services to end-users, while also taking into account arising privacy issues. While multiple context management platform architectures have been devised [3], this paper focuses primarily on Context- Broker-based architectures, such as the ones proposed in the projects Mobilife [4] and C-Cast [5]. More specifically, it focuses on the context management platform XCoA [6]. This platform uses XMPP for its main communication protocol, and publishes context information in a Context-Broker. This context information is provided by Context-Agents, such as mobile terminals, sensor networks and social networks. Due to the nature of the XMPP protocol, the context information is provided in XML form. This paper proposes the usage of a NoSQL storage system for the purpose of context information storage and retrieval in an XMPP broker-based context platform such as XCoA, together with a full-text searching engine. Through a comparison made through prototypes, the paper clearly demonstrates the advantages of NoSQL storage systems applied to the area of Context Management

Comparative Analysis of Location Management Schemes in Wireless ATM Networks

Mobility is the cornerstone of wireless networks. Supporting mobility requires some form of tracking to locate mobile terminals within the network. In the wireline ATM network, the terminal is fixed and the terminal is located by identifying the terminal and following the routing information provided at each switch along the path. As terminals become mobile, the path to the mobile becomes dynamic; the terminal and the path are no longer synonymous. Signalling traffic incurred in tracking mobile users and delivering enhanced services causes an additional load in the Wireless ATM (WArM) network. Efficient database and location management schemes are needed to meet the challenges from high density and mobility of users, and various service scenarios. In this thesis the three "natural" Location Management Strategies, i.e., Timer-Based, Location Area Based and Movement Based are studied and analysed for a W ATM network. The model used for depicting user motion and call arrival is Brownian motion with drift process and Poisson arrival process, respectively. The Timer-Based location management strategy is one in which the user updates its location periodically after an "optimum" interval of time. This optimum interval of time is based upon the user's mobility and call arrival characteristics and is therefore best suited for that particular mobile. In the Adaptive Location Area Based strategy, the user updates its location on each LA boundary crossing. The size of the LA changes according to the user' s mobility characteristics. The objective is to minimise the combined average signalling cost of both paging and registration for each individual mobile user such that the overall system-wide signalling cost for location tracking can be minimised

Enhancing the location-context through inference over positioning data

The current ubiquity of wireless communication networks is enabling new ways to compute the position of mobile devices and their users. One good example is the Place Lab system that exploits the beacons broadcast by many wireless networks to estimate the geographic position of mobile users. Although position is a fundamental dimension in the user’s context, other location-related dimensions of the context are also important for the development of innovative context-aware applications. In this paper we propose a new architecture for context acquisition and management, as a new layer added over the Place Lab system, where inference techniques over the basic positioning data are used to enrich the context with new dimensions without compromising user privacy

Towards Intelligent and Generic LBS for Drivers and Mobile Users

In this talk I will focus on Location-Based Services (LBS) for hybrid networks composed of both vehicles and mobile users. The motivation is the interest of studying data management solutions that take into account a generic environment where different types of moving objects share different types of data and possibly using different communication technologies (ad hoc wireless communications forming a pure mobile P2P network, hybrid mobile P2P network with support infrastructure nodes, wide-area communications like 3G, etc.). I will start by summarizing some data management challenges for vehicular networks, related to the exchange of events (efficient and effective content-based data dissemination for push-based data access), query processing (pull-based data access by using query dissemination or mobile agent technology), data item relevance evaluation, management of information about scarce resources (like available parking spaces or charge stations for electric vehicles), semantic data management, automatic knowledge extraction from the data items, multimedia data management, incentives, and trust. Then ..

Ubiquitous Internet in an integrated satellite-terrestrial environment: The SUITED solution

yesThe current Internet architecture appears to not be particularly suited to addressing the emerging needs of new classes of users who wish to gain access to multimedia services made available by ISPs, regardless of their location, while in motion and with a guaranteed level of quality. One of the main objectives of so-called nextgeneration systems is to overcome the limitations of today¿s available Internet by adopting an approach based on the integration of different mobile and fixed networks. The SUITED project moves in this direction since it aims at contributing to the design and deployment of the global mobile broadband system (GMBS), a unique satellite/terrestrial infrastructure ensuring nomadic users access to Internet services with a negotiated QoS. A description of the main features of the GMBS architecture, characterized by the integration of a multisegment access network with a federated ISP network is given in this article. The GMBS multimode terminal is schematically described, and an overview of the so-called QoS-aware mobility management scheme, devised for such a heterogeneous scenario,is provided

A survey of cellular IP in the next generation of network protocol

The main objective of mobility management in wireless data communication is to allows networks to search and locate (location management) mobile users while maintaining it’s connections (handoff management) whenever users move into a new network. Management of location and handoff divided into macromobility (for managing inter-domain network) and micromobility (for managing intra-domain network).For macromobility management, IETF has adopted Mobile IP and had perform very well for managing inter-domain mobility.However Mobile IP suffer from handover performance in intradomain network which is inefficient for mobile user with frequent handoff. For this defect,cellular IP protocol has been considered for managing intra-domain network for it’s fast handoff and interoperability with Mobile IP. This paper we present a review of different micro-mobility management protocols available to date. We also discuss various issues and challenges regarding mobility management for the next generation network protocol