Interworking Architectures in Heterogeneous Wireless Networks: An Algorithmic Overview

The scarce availability of spectrum and the proliferation of smartphones, social networking applications, online gaming etc., mobile network operators (MNOs) are faced with an exponential growth in packet switched data requirements on their networks. Haven invested in legacy systems (such as HSPA, WCDMA, WiMAX, Cdma2000, LTE, etc.) that have hitherto withstood the current and imminent data usage demand, future and projected usage surpass the capabilities of the evolution of these individual technologies. Hence, a more critical, cost-effective and flexible approach to provide ubiquitous coverage for the user using available spectrum is of high demand. Heterogeneous Networks make use of these legacy systems by allowing users to connect to the best network available and most importantly seamlessly handover active sessions amidst them. This paper presents a survey of interworking architectures between IMT 2000 candidate networks that employ the use of IEFT protocols such as MIP, mSCTP, HIP, MOBIKE, IKEV2 and SIP etc. to bring about this much needed capacity

The MobyDick Project: A Mobile Heterogeneous All-IP Architecture

Proceedings of Advanced Technologies, Applications and Market Strategies for 3G (ATAMS 2001). Cracow, Poland: 17-20 June, 2001.This paper presents the current stage of an IP-based architecture for heterogeneous environments, covering UMTS-like W-CDMA wireless access technology, wireless and wired LANs, that is being developed under the aegis of the IST Moby Dick project. This architecture treats all transmission capabilities as basic physical and data-link layers, and attempts to replace all higher-level tasks by IP-based strategies. The proposed architecture incorporates aspects of mobile-IPv6, fast handover, AAA-control, and Quality of Service. The architecture allows for an optimised control on the radio link layer resources. The Moby dick architecture is currently under refinement for implementation on field trials. The services planned for trials are data transfer and voice-over-IP.Publicad

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

Reliable Multicast Transport for Heterogeneous Mobile IP environment using Cross-Layer Information

Reliable multicast transport architecture designed for heterogeneous mobile IP environment using cross-layer information for enhanced Quality of Service (QoS) and seamless handover is discussed. In particular, application-specific reliable multicast retransmission schemes are proposed, which are aimed to minimize the protocol overhead taking into account behaviour of mobile receivers (loss of connectivity and handover) and the specific application requirements for reliable delivery (such as carousel, one-to-many download and streaming delivery combined with recording). The proposed localized retransmission strategies are flexible configured for tree-based multicast transport. Cross layer interactions in order to enhance reliable transport and support seamless handover is discussed considering IEEE 802.21 media independent handover mechanisms. The implementation is based on Linux IPv6 environment. Simulations in ns2 focusing on the benefits of the proposed multicast retransmission schemes for particular application scenarios are presented

Network-Assisted Handover for Heterogeneous Wireless Networks using IEEE 802.21

The IEEE 802.21 is a standard for enabling handover in heterogeneous wireless networks. Published in January 2009, it defines protocols and messages for mobile-to-node and node-to-node communication in a technology-neutral and flexible manner. The need arises because of the widespread diffusion of different technologies for wireless communications (e.g., WiFi, WiMAX, LTE) coexisting in the same geographical area. Even though the number of multi-radio multi-technology mobile devices is increasing significantly, there are no open solutions in the market to enable efficient inter-technology handover. As is often the case with communication standards, the structure of the required components, the procedures, and the algorithms are left unspecified by the IEEE 802.21 standard so as to promote competion by differentiation of equipment capabilities and services. The contribution of this thesis is two-fold: i) a design and an implemenation of the Media Independent Information Service (MIIS) server; and, ii) a solution to enable network-assisted handover using the IEEE 802.21 standard, aimed at reducing the handover latency and the energy consumption of mobile devices due to scanning. The MIIS server has been fully implemented in C++ under Linux. In order to perform testbed evaluations, all the required components have been implemented, as well, within an open source framework for IEEE 802.21 called ODTONE. Modifications to the latter have been performed for optimization and fine tuning, and for extending those functional modules needed but not fully implemented. For a realistic evaluation, Linux-based embedded COTS devices have been used, equipped with multiple IEEE 802.11a and IEEE 802.11g wireless network interface cards. This has required additional development for kernel/user space binding and hardware control. Testbed results are reported to show the effectiveness of the proposed solution, also proving the MIIS server scalability

Securing Handover in Wireless IP Networks

In wireless and mobile networks, handover is a complex process that involves multiple layers of protocol and security executions. With the growing popularity of real time communication services such as Voice of IP, a great challenge faced by handover nowadays comes from the impact of security implementations that can cause performance degradation especially for mobile devices with limited resources. Given the existing networks with heterogeneous wireless access technologies, one essential research question that needs be addressed is how to achieve a balance between security and performance during the handover. The variations of security policy and agreement among different services and network vendors make the topic challenging even more, due to the involvement of commercial and social factors. In order to understand the problems and challenges in this field, we study the properties of handover as well as state of the art security schemes to assist handover in wireless IP networks. Based on our analysis, we define a two-phase model to identify the key procedures of handover security in wireless and mobile networks. Through the model we analyze the performance impact from existing security schemes in terms of handover completion time, throughput, and Quality of Services (QoS). As our endeavor of seeking a balance between handover security and performance, we propose the local administrative domain as a security enhanced localized domain to promote the handover performance. To evaluate the performance improvement in local administrative domain, we implement the security protocols adopted by our proposal in the ns-2 simulation environment and analyze the measurement results based on our simulation test