PMIPv6 Integrated with MIH for Flow Mobility Management: A Real Testbed with Simultaneous Multi-Access in Heterogeneous Mobile Networks

Abstract

The exponential growth of the number of multihomed mobile devices is changing the way how we can connect to the Internet. Our mobile devices are demanding for more network resources, in terms of traffic volume and QoS requirements. Unfortunately, it is very hard to a multihomed device to be simultaneously connected to the network through multiple links. The current work enhances the network access of multihomed devices agnostically to the deployed access technologies. This enhancement is achieved by using simultaneously all of the mobile devices interfaces, and by routing each individual data flow through the most convenient access technology. The proposed solution is only deployed at the network side and it extends Proxy Mobile IPv6 with flow mobility in a completely transparent way to mobile nodes. In fact, it gives particular attention to the handover mechanisms, by improving the detection and attachment of nodes in the network, with the inclusion of the IEEE 802.21 standard in the solution. This provides the necessary implementation and integration details to extend a network topology with femtocell devices. Each femtocell is equipped with various network interfaces supporting a diverse set of access technologies. There is also a decision entity that manages individually each data flow according to its QoS / QoE requisites. The proposed solution has been developed and extensively tested with a real prototype. Evaluation results evidence that the overhead for using the solution is negligible as compared to the offered advantages such as: the support of flow mobility, the fulfil of VoIP functional requisites, the session continuity in spite of flows mobility, its low overhead, its high scalability, and the complete transparency of the proposed solution to the user terminals.

Elastic Provisioning of Network and Computing Resources at the Edge for IoT Services

“…Our proposal supports the management of edge-computing resources in elastic and agile ways. A possible distributed administration of edge storage is possible, eventually, in reaction to the evolution of spatio-temporal data popularity [27], or a future handling of flow mobility between different IoT access technologies could be enabled [28]. This is, however, beyond the scope of the present work, but we submit that a tight coupling of a SDN controller and a broker in edge nodes, such as middleboxes at user premises, are crucial for on-demand management of local heterogeneous resources [19].…”

Game Theory for Cooperation in Multi-Access Edge Computing

“…In addition, it is of particular interest the support of simultaneous data/multimedia flows through different access systems (LTE-A, WLAN, Wimax). Recent works (Yap et al, 2012) (Silva, Marinheiro, Moura, & Almeida, 2013) (Moura & Edwards, 2015) (Moura & Edwards, 2016) (Alves, Silva, Neto Marinheiro, & Moura, 2018) propose that mobile multimode terminals should use all the available connectivity options simultaneously. The mobile terminal should choose dynamically the most suitable network to each flow, obtaining faster connections by stitching flows over multiple networks, decrease the usage cost by choosing the most cost-effective network that meets application requisites, and reduce the energy consumption by selecting the technologies with the lowest energy-usage per byte.…”

“…The mobile terminal should choose dynamically the most suitable network to each flow, obtaining faster connections by stitching flows over multiple networks, decrease the usage cost by choosing the most cost-effective network that meets application requisites, and reduce the energy consumption by selecting the technologies with the lowest energy-usage per byte. The management of the flows per network interface may not only be implemented independently by the terminal, but also be assisted transparently by the network (Alves et al, 2018). This concept for FNs contributes to the perspective of integrating complementary access technologies with overlapping coverage to provide the expected ubiquitous coverage and to achieve the Always Best Connected (ABC) concept (Louta, Zournatzis, Kraounakis, Sarigiannidis, & Demetropoulos, 2011).…”

“…Brokerage systems, possibly implementing GT algorithms, can manage the network architecture, in which distributed nodes discover relevant context information to enhance the usage of local available connectivity resources (Mateus & Marinheiro, 2010). In this way, mobile operators can develop policies for IP flow mobility, and control which traffic is routed over different access technologies (Alves et al, 2018).…”