Pre-Register Algorithm for SVC by Fast BSS Transition Wireless Networks

[[abstract]]Recently, with the more extensive deployment of Wireless Local Area Networks (WLAN), and the growing population of mobile users, the unstable handover problem in wireless network services receives more and more attention. Since users expect the continuity of services while roaming, IEEE 802 family defines the standard IEEE 802.11r (Fast BSS Transition) to reduce the interrupted time of services to the minimum. Supposing users use IEEE 802.11r to execute the pre-authentication process with all Access Points, there will be too many authenticated messages. Therefore, an IEEE 802.11r based algorithm is proposed to avoid the pre-authentication process with all APs. In order to reduce the pre-register APs, we first of all divide the coverage of the APs into four regions according to the RSSI. Second, to figure out more accurate APs, we dynamically adjust the region. Third, if the mobile device cannot find the AP of each region, we further modify the region. Finally, we pick up an AP to execute the pre-authentication each region. With the four above-mentioned considerations proposed in this algorithm, we are able to make use of roaming more effectively.[[conferencetype]]國際[[iscallforpapers]]Y[[conferencelocation]]Kyoto, Japa

Wireless Handoff Optimization: A Comparison of IEEE 802.11r and HOKEY

Abstract. IEEE 802.11 or Wi-Fi has long been the most widely deployed technology for wireless broadband Internet access, yet it is increasingly facing competition from other technologies such as packet-switched cellular data. End user expectations and demands have grown towards a more mobile and agile network. At one end, users demand more and more mobility and on the other end, they expect a good QoS which is sufficient to meet the needs of VoIP and streaming video. However, as the 4G technologies start knocking at doors, 802.11 is being questioned for its mobility and QoS (Quality of Service). Unnecessary handoffs and reauthentication during handoffs result in higher latencies. Recent research shows that if the handoff latency is high, services like VoIP experience excessive jitter. Bulk of the handoff latency is caused by security mechanisms, such as the 4-way handshake and, in particular, EAP authentication to a remote authentication server. IEEE 802.11r and HandOver KEY (HOKEY) are protocol enhancements that have been introduced to mitigate these challenges and to manage fast and secure handoffs in a seamless manner. 802.11r extends the 802.11 base specification to support fast handoff in the MAC protocol. On the other hand, HOKEY is a suite of protocols standardized by IETF to support fast handoffs. This paper analyzes the applicability of 802.11r and HOKEY solutions to enable fast authentication and fast handoffs. It also presents an overview of the fast handoff solutions proposed in some recent research

MeshScan: a Fast and Efficient Handoff Scheme for IEEE 802.11 Wireless Mesh Networks

As a next generation network solution, Wireless Mesh Networks (WMN) provides fast Internet access to a large area, which is from university campus to city scale. In order to provide an uninterrupted Internet experience to a mobile client, a process called handoff is required to maintain the network connection from one Mesh Node (MN) to another MN. Ideally, handoff should be completely transparent to mobile users. A critical application like VoIP will require a handoff capability that transfers a call from one mesh node (MN) to another in less than 50 msec. However the current IEEE 802.11 standards do not address the handoff well. Studies have revealed that standard handoff on IEEE 802.11 WLANs incurs a latency of the order of hundreds of milliseconds to several seconds. Moreover, the discovery step in the handoff process accounts for more than 99% of this latency. The study addresses the latency in the discovery step by introducing an efficient and powerful client-side scan technique called MeshScan which replaces the discovery step with a unicast scan that transmits Authentication Request frames to potential MNs. A prototype of MeshScan has been developed based on the MadWifi WLAN driver on Linux operating systems. The feasibility of MeshScan to support fast handoff in WMNs has been demonstrated through extensive computer simulations and experiments under same given conditions. The results from the simulations and experiments show that the latency associated with handoff can be reduced from seconds to a few milliseconds by using the MeshScan technique. Furthermore, it is shown that MeshScan can continue to function effectively even under heavy traffic loads

Diseño y validación de un método de roaming rápido en capa 2 para una red Wi-Fi con autenticación 802.1X

E l trabajo desarrollado en la presente tesis consiste en el diseño y validación de un método que garantice un roaming rápido, menor a 150 ms, para una red Wi-Fi con el nivel más alto de seguridad recomendado en el estándar 802.11 (WPA2-Enterprise) el cual utiliza un esquema de autenticación por usuario (802.1X). En el primer capítulo, se recorre brevemente la historia de las redes Wi-Fi y se describe cómo el roaming termina siendo determinante para brindar calidad de servicio a diversas aplicaciones de tiempo real. Asimismo, se presentan los objetivos y el alcance del presente trabajo. En el segundo capítulo, se explica brevemente conceptos básicos de redes Wi-Fi. Además, se presenta la enmienda 802.11i la cual indica el nivel de seguridad de una red Wi-Fi y se explica el proceso de asociación a una Red de Seguridad Robusta. En el tercer capítulo, se describe el proceso de roaming, tipos y fases. Además, se explica el impacto del nivel de seguridad en un proceso de roaming. Luego, se presentan los mecanismos y métodos de roaming rápido introducidos por el estándar IEEE 802.11 además del método OKC. En la última sección de este capítulo, se brindan observaciones a los métodos de roaming rápido actuales. En el cuarto capítulo, se indican los requerimientos de diseño que se han considerado para el sistema de roaming rápido. En la segunda parte de este capítulo, se explica el diseño cada etapa del sistema, además de detallarse la implementación de la arquitectura y el método de key Caching seleccionado. En el capítulo final, se presentan las diferentes pruebas que se llevaron a cabo para verificar el funcionamiento del sistema. Por último, se presentan las conclusiones obtenidas de la implementación y las pruebas realizadas sobre el sistema, basadas en los objetivos de la tesis y trabajos que podrían complementar el diseño desarrollado.Tesi

Seamless Hand-over Algorithm for Wireless Enterprise Networks

Masteroppgave i informasjons- og kommunikasjonsteknologi 2007 – Høgskolen i Agder, GrimstadThe mass deployment of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers’ (IEEE) 802.11 based wireless local area networks (WLAN) and increased sales in hand-held devices supporting WLAN have resulted in an urgent need to support fast WLAN handovers or roaming. The reason for this problem arising now is that hand-held devices are more mobile than a laptop and their users actively use their hand-held equipment while moving. Laptop users are often called nomadic users in contrast to the real mobile users. The customarily solution is that when a connection is lost with the associated access point, one tries to find a new access point and tries to connect to it. The process of finding a new access point and connecting to it takes too long time in current implementations. Some applications cannot tolerate to be interrupted or disconnected for a very long time period before the session breaks. Therefore we need mechanisms to make sure that the disconnection time is as low as possible. Our algorithm uses an improved threshold scheme to detect the handover. The algorithm avoids many unnecessary handovers and prevents rapidly dropped signal strength or poor connection quality. In addition, we do scanning and AP selection before critical situations occur and therefore are faster in disconnecting from the current AP. As a result, the whole disconnection time is only the handover execution time, which is much shorter than the customarily one’s. Furthermore, we use signal strength, hysteresis and trends to classify the candidate APs. The result allows us to choose the best one of them and then switch to it. Through thresholds and hysteresis based decisions we avoid the latent unnecessary handovers resulting in a undesired “yoyo” effect, where the client continuously jumps back and forth between APs. Our handover algorithm is signal strength based. For technical reasons, the signal strength is the main parameter we considered. In the future, several other quality parameters can be implemented into our algorithm to make the algorithm even more efficient, e.g., by querying APs about their current load and QoS resources

Il roaming nelle reti mobili per le applicazioni seamless del punto di vista del livello 2

L'elaborato è concentrato sul problema del handoff legato alla tecnologia Wireless IEEE 802.11b/g. Saranno evidenziati gli aspetti e limiti strutturali del mezzo trasmissivo in relazione anche all'uso di protocolli di sicurezza utilizzati nelle comunicazioni tra computing devices. Durante il percorso realizzato saranno anche analizzate le singole fasi che caratterizzano il processo di handoff, nel tentativo di approfondire questo meccanismo per poi presentare soluzioni ed implementazioni presenti in letteratura

Towards edge robotics: the progress from cloud-based robotic systems to intelligent and context-aware robotic services

Current robotic systems handle a different range of applications such as video surveillance, delivery of goods, cleaning, material handling, assembly, painting, or pick and place services. These systems have been embraced not only by the general population but also by the vertical industries to help them in performing daily activities. Traditionally, the robotic systems have been deployed in standalone robots that were exclusively dedicated to performing a specific task such as cleaning the floor in indoor environments. In recent years, cloud providers started to offer their infrastructures to robotic systems for offloading some of the robot’s functions. This ultimate form of the distributed robotic system was first introduced 10 years ago as cloud robotics and nowadays a lot of robotic solutions are appearing in this form. As a result, standalone robots became software-enhanced objects with increased reconfigurability as well as decreased complexity and cost. Moreover, by offloading the heavy processing from the robot to the cloud, it is easier to share services and information from various robots or agents to achieve better cooperation and coordination. Cloud robotics is suitable for human-scale responsive and delay-tolerant robotic functionalities (e.g., monitoring, predictive maintenance). However, there is a whole set of real-time robotic applications (e.g., remote control, motion planning, autonomous navigation) that can not be executed with cloud robotics solutions, mainly because cloud facilities traditionally reside far away from the robots. While the cloud providers can ensure certain performance in their infrastructure, very little can be ensured in the network between the robots and the cloud, especially in the last hop where wireless radio access networks are involved. Over the last years advances in edge computing, fog computing, 5G NR, network slicing, Network Function Virtualization (NFV), and network orchestration are stimulating the interest of the industrial sector to satisfy the stringent and real-time requirements of their applications. Robotic systems are a key piece in the industrial digital transformation and their benefits are very well studied in the literature. However, designing and implementing a robotic system that integrates all the emerging technologies and meets the connectivity requirements (e.g., latency, reliability) is an ambitious task. This thesis studies the integration of modern Information andCommunication Technologies (ICTs) in robotic systems and proposes some robotic enhancements that tackle the real-time constraints of robotic services. To evaluate the performance of the proposed enhancements, this thesis departs from the design and prototype implementation of an edge native robotic system that embodies the concepts of edge computing, fog computing, orchestration, and virtualization. The proposed edge robotics system serves to represent two exemplary robotic applications. In particular, autonomous navigation of mobile robots and remote-control of robot manipulator where the end-to-end robotic system is distributed between the robots and the edge server. The open-source prototype implementation of the designed edge native robotic system resulted in the creation of two real-world testbeds that are used in this thesis as a baseline scenario for the evaluation of new innovative solutions in robotic systems. After detailing the design and prototype implementation of the end-to-end edge native robotic system, this thesis proposes several enhancements that can be offered to robotic systems by adapting the concept of edge computing via the Multi-Access Edge Computing (MEC) framework. First, it proposes exemplary network context-aware enhancements in which the real-time information about robot connectivity and location can be used to dynamically adapt the end-to-end system behavior to the actual status of the communication (e.g., radio channel). Three different exemplary context-aware enhancements are proposed that aim to optimize the end-to-end edge native robotic system. Later, the thesis studies the capability of the edge native robotic system to offer potential savings by means of computation offloading for robot manipulators in different deployment configurations. Further, the impact of different wireless channels (e.g., 5G, 4G andWi-Fi) to support the data exchange between a robot manipulator and its remote controller are assessed. In the following part of the thesis, the focus is set on how orchestration solutions can support mobile robot systems to make high quality decisions. The application of OKpi as an orchestration algorithm and DLT-based federation are studied to meet the KPIs that autonomously controlledmobile robots have in order to provide uninterrupted connectivity over the radio access network. The elaborated solutions present high compatibility with the designed edge robotics system where the robot driving range is extended without any interruption of the end-to-end edge robotics service. While the DLT-based federation extends the robot driving range by deploying access point extension on top of external domain infrastructure, OKpi selects the most suitable access point and computing resource in the cloud-to-thing continuum in order to fulfill the latency requirements of autonomously controlled mobile robots. To conclude the thesis the focus is set on how robotic systems can improve their performance by leveraging Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) algorithms to generate smart decisions. To do so, the edge native robotic system is presented as a true embodiment of a Cyber-Physical System (CPS) in Industry 4.0, showing the mission of AI in such concept. It presents the key enabling technologies of the edge robotic system such as edge, fog, and 5G, where the physical processes are integrated with computing and network domains. The role of AI in each technology domain is identified by analyzing a set of AI agents at the application and infrastructure level. In the last part of the thesis, the movement prediction is selected to study the feasibility of applying a forecast-based recovery mechanism for real-time remote control of robotic manipulators (FoReCo) that uses ML to infer lost commands caused by interference in the wireless channel. The obtained results are showcasing the its potential in simulation and real-world experimentation.Programa de Doctorado en Ingeniería Telemática por la Universidad Carlos III de MadridPresidente: Karl Holger.- Secretario: Joerg Widmer.- Vocal: Claudio Cicconett