SCALABLE AND EFFICIENT VERTICAL HANDOVER DECISION ALGORITHMS IN VEHICULAR NETWORK CONTEXTS

A finales de los años noventa, y al comienzo del nuevo milenio, las redes inalámbricas han evolucionado bastante, pasando de ser sólo una tecnología prometedora para convertirse en un requisito para las actividades cotidianas en las sociedades desarrolladas. La infraestructura de transporte también ha evolucionado, ofreciendo comunicación a bordo para mejorar la seguridad vial y el acceso a contenidos de información y entretenimiento. Los requisitos de los usuarios finales se han hecho dependientes de la tecnología, lo que significa que sus necesidades de conectividad han aumentado debido a los diversos requisitos de las aplicaciones que se ejecutan en sus dispositivos móviles, tales como tabletas, teléfonos inteligentes, ordenadores portátiles o incluso ordenadores de abordo (On-Board Units (OBUs)) dentro de los vehículos. Para cumplir con dichos requisitos de conectividad, y teniendo en cuenta las diferentes redes inalámbricas disponibles, es necesario adoptar técnicas de Vertical Handover (VHO) para cambiar de red de forma transparente y sin necesidad de intervención del usuario. El objetivo de esta tesis es desarrollar algoritmos de decisión (Vertical Handover Decision Algorithms (VHDAs)) eficientes y escalables, optimizados para el contexto de las redes vehiculares. En ese sentido se ha propuesto, desarrollado y probado diferentes algoritmos de decisión basados en la infraestructura disponible en las actuales, y probablemente en las futuras, redes inalámbricas y redes vehiculares. Para ello se han combinado diferentes técnicas, métodos computacionales y modelos matemáticos, con el fin de garantizar una conectividad apropiada, y realizando el handover hacia las redes más adecuadas de manera a cumplir tanto con los requisitos de los usuarios como los requisitos de las aplicaciones. Con el fin de evaluar el contexto, se han utilizado diferentes herramientas para obtener información variada, como la disponibilidad de la red, el estado de la red, la geolocalizaciónMárquez Barja, JM. (2012). SCALABLE AND EFFICIENT VERTICAL HANDOVER DECISION ALGORITHMS IN VEHICULAR NETWORK CONTEXTS [Tesis doctoral no publicada]. Universitat Politècnica de València. https://doi.org/10.4995/Thesis/10251/17869Palanci

Mobility management in 5G heterogeneous networks

In recent years, mobile data traffic has increased exponentially as a result of widespread popularity and uptake of portable devices, such as smartphones, tablets and laptops. This growth has placed enormous stress on network service providers who are committed to offering the best quality of service to consumer groups. Consequently, telecommunication engineers are investigating innovative solutions to accommodate the additional load offered by growing numbers of mobile users. The fifth generation (5G) of wireless communication standard is expected to provide numerous innovative solutions to meet the growing demand of consumer groups. Accordingly the ultimate goal is to achieve several key technological milestones including up to 1000 times higher wireless area capacity and a significant cut in power consumption. Massive deployment of small cells is likely to be a key innovation in 5G, which enables frequent frequency reuse and higher data rates. Small cells, however, present a major challenge for nodes moving at vehicular speeds. This is because the smaller coverage areas of small cells result in frequent handover, which leads to lower throughput and longer delay. In this thesis, a new mobility management technique is introduced that reduces the number of handovers in a 5G heterogeneous network. This research also investigates techniques to accommodate low latency applications in nodes moving at vehicular speeds

Application priority framework for fixed mobile converged communication networks

This thesis was submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy and awarded by Brunel University.The current prospects in wired and wireless access networks, it is becoming increasingly important to address potential convergence in order to offer integrated broadband services. These systems will need to offer higher data transmission capacities and long battery life, which is the catalyst for an everincreasing variety of air interface technologies targeting local area to wide area connectivity. Current integrated industrial networks do not offer application aware context delivery and enhanced services for optimised networks. Application aware services provide value-added functionality to business applications by capturing, integrating, and consolidating intelligence about users and their endpoint devices from various points in the network. This thesis mainly intends to resolve the issues related to ubiquitous application aware service, fair allocation of radio access, reduced energy consumption and improved capacity. A technique that measures and evaluates the data rate demand to reduce application response time and queuing delay for multi radio interfaces is proposed. The technique overcomes the challenges of network integration, requiring no user intervention, saving battery life and selecting the radio access connection for the application requested by the end user. This study is split in two parts. The first contribution identifies some constraints of the services towards the application layer in terms of e.g. data rate and signal strength. The objectives are achieved by application controlled handover (ACH) mechanism in order to maintain acceptable data rate for real-time application services. It also looks into the impact of the radio link on the application and identifies elements and parameters like wireless link quality and handover that will influence the application type. It also identifies some enhanced traditional mechanisms such as distance controlled multihop and mesh topology required in order to support energy efficient multimedia applications. The second contribution unfolds an intelligent application priority assignment mechanism (IAPAM) for medical applications using wireless sensor networks. IAPAM proposes and evaluates a technique based on prioritising multiple virtual queues for the critical nature of medical data to improve instant transmission. Various mobility patterns (directed, controlled and random waypoint) has been investigated and compared by simulating IAPAM enabled mobile BWSN. The following topics have been studied, modelled, simulated and discussed in this thesis: 1. Application Controlled Handover (ACH) for multi radios over fibre 2. Power Controlled Scheme for mesh multi radios over fibre using ACH 3. IAPAM for Biomedical Wireless Sensor Networks (BWSN) and impact of mobility over IAPAM enabled BWSN. Extensive simulation studies are performed to analyze and to evaluate the proposed techniques. Simulation results demonstrate significant improvements in multi radios over fibre performance in terms of application response delay and power consumption by upto 75% and 15 % respectively, reduction in traffic loss by upto 53% and reduction in delay for real time application by more than 25% in some cases

Future Trends and Challenges for Mobile and Convergent Networks

Some traffic characteristics like real-time, location-based, and community-inspired, as well as the exponential increase on the data traffic in mobile networks, are challenging the academia and standardization communities to manage these networks in completely novel and intelligent ways, otherwise, current network infrastructures can not offer a connection service with an acceptable quality for both emergent traffic demand and application requisites. In this way, a very relevant research problem that needs to be addressed is how a heterogeneous wireless access infrastructure should be controlled to offer a network access with a proper level of quality for diverse flows ending at multi-mode devices in mobile scenarios. The current chapter reviews recent research and standardization work developed under the most used wireless access technologies and mobile access proposals. It comprehensively outlines the impact on the deployment of those technologies in future networking environments, not only on the network performance but also in how the most important requirements of several relevant players, such as, content providers, network operators, and users/terminals can be addressed. Finally, the chapter concludes referring the most notable aspects in how the environment of future networks are expected to evolve like technology convergence, service convergence, terminal convergence, market convergence, environmental awareness, energy-efficiency, self-organized and intelligent infrastructure, as well as the most important functional requisites to be addressed through that infrastructure such as flow mobility, data offloading, load balancing and vertical multihoming.Comment: In book 4G & Beyond: The Convergence of Networks, Devices and Services, Nova Science Publishers, 201

Handover management in mobile WiMAX using adaptive cross-layer technique

The protocol type and the base station (BS) technology are the main communication media between the Vehicle to Infrastructure (V2I) communication in vehicular networks. During high speed vehicle movement, the best communication would be with a seamless handover (HO) delay in terms of lower packet loss and throughput. Many studies have focused on how to reduce the HO delay during lower speeds of the vehicle with data link (L2) and network (L3) layers protocol. However, this research studied the Transport Layer (L4) protocol mobile Stream Control Transmission Protocol (mSCTP) used as an optimal protocol in collaboration with the Location Manager (LM) and Domain Name Server (DNS). In addition, the BS technology that performs smooth HO employing an adaptive algorithm in L2 to perform the HO according to current vehicle speed was also included in the research. The methods derived from the combination of L4 and the BS technology methods produced an Adaptive Cross-Layer (ACL) design which is a mobility oriented handover management scheme that adapts the HO procedure among the protocol layers. The optimization has a better performance during HO as it is reduces scanning delay and diversity level as well as support transparent mobility among layers in terms of low packet loss and higher throughput. All of these metrics are capable of offering maximum flexibility and efficiency while allowing applications to refine the behaviour of the HO procedure. Besides that, evaluations were performed in various scenarios including different vehicle speeds and background traffic. The performance evaluation of the proposed ACL had approximately 30% improvement making it better than the other handover solutions

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

A network mobility management architecture for a heteregeneous network environment

Network mobility management enables mobility of personal area networks and vehicular networks across heterogeneous access networks using a Mobile Router. This dissertation presents a network mobility management architecture for minimizing the impact of handoffs on the communications of nodes in the mobile network. The architecture addresses mobility in legacy networks without infrastructure support, but can also exploit infrastructure support for improved handoff performance. Further, the proposed architecture increases the efficiency of communications of nodes in the mobile network with counter parts in the fixed network through the use of caching and route optimization. The performance and costs of the proposed architecture are evaluated through empirical and numerical analysis. The analysis shows the feasibility of the architecture in the networks of today and in those of the near future.Verkkojen liikkuuvudenhallinta mahdollistaa henkilökohtaisten ja ajoneuvoihin asennettujen verkkojen liikkuvuuden heterogeenisessä verkkoympäristössä käyttäen liikkuvaa reititintä. Tämä väitöskirja esittää uuden arkkitehtuurin verkkojen liikkuvuudenhallintaan, joka minimoi verkonvaihdon vaikutuksen päätelaitteiden yhteyksiin. Vanhoissa verkoissa, joiden infrastruktuuri ei tue verkkojen liikkuvuutta, verkonvaihdos täytyy hallita liikkuvassa reitittimessa. Standardoitu verkkojen liikkuvuudenhallintaprotokolla NEMO mahdollistaa tämän käyttäen ankkurisolmua kiinteässä verkossa pakettien toimittamiseen päätelaitteiden kommunikaatiokumppaneilta liikkuvalle reitittimelle. NEMO:ssa verkonvaihdos aiheuttaa käynnissä olevien yhteyksien keskeytymisen yli sekunnin mittaiseksi ajaksi, aiheuttaen merkittävää häiriötä viestintäsovelluksille. Esitetyssä arkkitehtuurissa verkonvaihdon vaikutus minimoidaan varustamalla liikkuva reititin kahdella radiolla. Käyttäen kahta radiota liikkuva reititin pystyy suorittamaan verkonvaihdon keskeyttämättä päätelaitteiden yhteyksiä, mikäli verkonvaihtoon on riittävästi aikaa. Käytettävissa oleva aika riippuu liikkuvan reitittimen nopeudesta ja radioverkon rakenteesta. Arkkitehtuuri osaa myös hyödyntää infrastruktuurin tukea saumattomaan verkonvaihtoon. Verkkoinfrastruktuurin tuki nopeuttaa verkonvaihdosprosessia, kasvattaenmaksimaalista verkonvaihdos tahtia. Tällöin liikkuva reitin voi käyttää lyhyen kantaman radioverkkoja, joiden solun säde on yli 80m, ajonopeuksilla 90m/s asti ilman, että verkonvaihdos keskeyttää päätelaitteiden yhteyksiä. Lisäksi ehdotettu arkkitehtuuri tehostaa kommunikaatiota käyttäen cache-palvelimia liikkuvassa ja kiinteässä verkossa ja optimoitua reititystä liikkuvien päätelaitteiden ja kiinteässä verkossa olevien kommunikaatiosolmujen välillä. Cache-palvelinarkkitehtuuri hyödyntää vapaita radioresursseja liikkuvan verkon cache-palvelimen välimuistin päivittämiseen. Heterogeenisessä verkkoympäristossä cache-palvelimen päivitys suoritetaan lyhyen kantaman laajakaistaisia radioverkkoja käyttäen. Liikkuvan reitittimen siirtyessä laajakaistaisen radioverkon peitealueen ulkopuolelle päätelaitteille palvellaan sisältöä, kuten www sivuja tai videota cache-palvelimelta, säästäen laajemman kantaman radioverkon rajoitetumpia resursseja. Arkkitehtuurissa käytetään optimoitua reititystä päätelaitteiden ja niiden kommunikaatiokumppaneiden välillä. Optimoitu reititysmekanismi vähentää liikkuvuudenhallintaan käytettyjen protokollien langattoman verkon resurssien kulutusta. Lisäksi optimoitu reititysmekanismi tehostaa pakettien reititystä käyttäen suorinta reittiä kommunikaatiosolmujen välillä. Esitetyn arkkitehtuurin suorituskyky arvioidaan empiirisen ja numeerisen analyysin avulla. Analyysi arvioi arkkitehtuurin suorituskykyä ja vertaa sitä aikaisemmin ehdotettuihin ratkaisuihin ja osoittaa arkkitehtuurin soveltuvan nykyisiin ja lähitulevaisuuden langattomiin verkkoihin.reviewe

A framework for supporting network continuity in vehicular IPv6 communications

The appearance of recent standards about cooperative ITS architectures towards a reference communication stack has been an inflection point in the research about vehicular networks. The ISO Communication Access for Land Mobiles (CALM) and the ETSI European ITS communication architecture have paved the way towards real and interoperable vehicular cooperative systems. Within these convergent proposals, IPv6 communications are recognized as a key component to enable traffic efficiency and infotainment applications. The proper operation of these applications and the achievement of value-added ITS services require an uninterrupted network connectivity. This paper addresses this problem by proposing a novel communication stack to support the provision of continuous and secure IPv6 vehicular communications. The solution follows the ISO/ETSI guidelines for the development of cooperative ITS systems and is based on standardized technologies such as Network Mobility (NEMO) protocol to provide an integral management of IPv6mobility. The solution integrates IEEE 802.21 media independent handover services for optimizing the handover process. While the support to the handover optimization offered by the proposed ITS communication stack is demonstrated through a mobility use case, a real testbed supporting most of the communications features is developed to validate and assess the real performance of the stack design.This work has been sponsored by the European Seventh Framework Program, through the ITSSv6 (contract 270519) and FOTsis (contract 270447) projects; the Ministry of Science and Innovation, through the Walkie-Talkie project (TIN2011-27543-C03); and the Seneca Foundation, by means of the GERM program (04552/GERM/06)

Bit error rate estimation in WiMAX communications at vehicular speeds using Nakagami-m fading model

The wireless communication industry has experienced a rapid technological evolution from its basic first generation (1G) wireless systems to the latest fourth generation (4G) wireless broadband systems. Wireless broadband systems are becoming increasingly popular with consumers and the technological strength of 4G has played a major role behind the success of wireless broadband systems. The IEEE 802.16m standard of the Worldwide Interoperability for Microwave Access (WiMAX) has been accepted as a 4G standard by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers in 2011. The IEEE 802.16m is fully optimised for wireless communications in fixed environments and can deliver very high throughput and excellent quality of service. In mobile communication environments however, WiMAX consumers experience a graceful degradation of service as a direct function of vehicular speeds. At high vehicular speeds, the throughput drops in WiMAX systems and unless proactive measures such as forward error control and packet size optimisation are adopted and properly adjusted, many applications cannot be facilitated at high vehicular speeds in WiMAX communications. For any proactive measure, bit error rate estimation as a function of vehicular speed, serves as a useful tool. In this thesis, we present an analytical model for bit error rate estimation in WiMAX communications using the Nakagami-m fading model. We also show, through an analysis of the data collected from a practical WiMAX system, that the Nakagami-m model can be made adaptive as a function of speed, to represent fading in fixed environments as well as mobile environments