Multicast Mobility in Mobile IP Version 6 (MIPv6) : Problem Statement and Brief Survey

Publisher PD

Quality-Oriented Mobility Management for Multimedia Content Delivery to Mobile Users

The heterogeneous wireless networking environment determined by the latest developments in wireless access technologies promises a high level of communication resources for mobile computational devices. Although the communication resources provided, especially referring to bandwidth, enable multimedia streaming to mobile users, maintaining a high user perceived quality is still a challenging task. The main factors which affect quality in multimedia streaming over wireless networks are mainly the error-prone nature of the wireless channels and the user mobility. These factors determine a high level of dynamics of wireless communication resources, namely variations in throughput and packet loss as well as network availability and delays in delivering the data packets. Under these conditions maintaining a high level of quality, as perceived by the user, requires a quality oriented mobility management scheme. Consequently we propose the Smooth Adaptive Soft-Handover Algorithm, a novel quality oriented handover management scheme which unlike other similar solutions, smoothly transfer the data traffic from one network to another using multiple simultaneous connections. To estimate the capacity of each connection the novel Quality of Multimedia Streaming (QMS) metric is proposed. The QMS metric aims at offering maximum flexibility and efficiency allowing the applications to fine tune the behavior of the handover algorithm. The current simulation-based performance evaluation clearly shows the better performance of the proposed Smooth Adaptive Soft-Handover Algorithm as compared with other handover solutions. The evaluation was performed in various scenarios including multiple mobile hosts performing handover simultaneously, wireless networks with variable overlapping areas, and various network congestion levels

A new framework for minimising handover in multicast mobility

Nowadays, mobile devices support a variety of multimedia applications such as live video, radio or online gaming. People spend their time on mobile devices for entertainment more and more via the internet. Due to the requirements of multimedia applications over wireless communication those applications require a huge bandwidth on the network to support them, which creates problems for the network provider. However, one pattern that is appropriate for the efficient delivery of multimedia messages is multicast delivery.Multicast services do, however, introduce challenges within the network when the recipients of the service are moving. Powerful multicast routing protocols are designed for static client IP addresses. Hence, when the mobile node changes the location, it introduces the problem of access network handover. Therefore, this is the aim of the research where a new framework will be developed for multicast mobility within WiFi network to reduce and provide smooth mobility when handover occurs. This research is focused on techniques to reduce handover latency, minimize packet loss and provide connection when a user moves between network zones.To achieve these aims, this designed framework lets mobile nodes send the message to register to foreign agents in advance for addressing IP address of the new zone and to establish the multicast tree earlier. Moreover, there are processes that keep the connection of the path alive.The framework is being simulated on OPNET Modeler for evaluating the performance in terms of handover latency time, the number of packet loss and so on. There are many scenarios that have been tested. According to the results, it shows that the new framework has reduced handover latency time around 60% on average and minimized packet delay approximately 0.7 - 150 ms on mobile node depending on network topology. This framework can provide IP address reconfiguration, binding update, joining multicast group and distribution path of multicast tree in advance. However, there are some overheads and cost that this framework has to pay for such as IP address database, increasing broadcast within networks and keeping connection path alive

User-centric power-friendly quality-based network selection strategy for heterogeneous wireless environments

The ‘Always Best Connected’ vision is built around the scenario of a mobile user seamlessly roaming within a multi-operator multi-technology multi-terminal multi-application multi-user environment supported by the next generation of wireless networks. In this heterogeneous environment, users equipped with multi-mode wireless mobile devices will access rich media services via one or more access networks. All these access networks may differ in terms of technology, coverage range, available bandwidth, operator, monetary cost, energy usage etc. In this context, there is a need for a smart network selection decision to be made, to choose the best available network option to cater for the user’s current application and requirements. The decision is a difficult one, especially given the number and dynamics of the possible input parameters. What parameters are used and how those parameters model the application requirements and user needs is important. Also, game theory approaches can be used to model and analyze the cooperative or competitive interaction between the rational decision makers involved, which are users, seeking to get good service quality at good value prices, and/or the network operators, trying to increase their revenue. This thesis presents the roadmap towards an ‘Always Best Connected’ environment. The proposed solution includes an Adapt-or-Handover solution which makes use of a Signal Strength-based Adaptive Multimedia Delivery mechanism (SAMMy) and a Power-Friendly Access Network Selection Strategy (PoFANS) in order to help the user in taking decisions, and to improve the energy efficiency at the end-user mobile device. A Reputation-based System is proposed, which models the user-network interaction as a repeated cooperative game following the repeated Prisoner’s Dilemma game from Game Theory. It combines reputation-based systems, game theory and a network selection mechanism in order to create a reputation-based heterogeneous environment. In this environment, the users keep track of their individual history with the visited networks. Every time, a user connects to a network the user-network interaction game is played. The outcome of the game is a network reputation factor which reflects the network’s previous behavior in assuring service guarantees to the user. The network reputation factor will impact the decision taken by the user next time, when he/she will have to decide whether to connect or not to that specific network. The performance of the proposed solutions was evaluated through in-depth analysis and both simulation-based and experimental-oriented testing. The results clearly show improved performance of the proposed solutions in comparison with other similar state-of-the-art solutions. An energy consumption study for a Google Nexus One streaming adaptive multimedia was performed, and a comprehensive survey on related Game Theory research are provided as part of the work