Network Attachment Point Research Articles

A softwarized and MEC-enabled protocol architecture supporting consumer mobility in Information-Centric Networks

Information-Centric Networking emerged as a powerful enabling technology for the provisioning of scalable and efficient real-time services in Future Internet, mobile architectures, and multi-hop wireless mesh networks. To serve mobile consumers, most of scientific contributions suggest to extend the information-centric communication primitives by means of a pull-based methodology, according to which the mobile consumer issues pending requests every time it reaches a new network attachment point. This approach, however, generates two important shortcomings. First, the requests delivered before the handover will generate stale paths with wrong forwarding information in their network routers. As a consequence, some new contents will be delivered also to previous locations, thus wasting bandwidth. Second, during handovers, mobile consumers may miss some contents released in real-time and lose the synchronization with the remote producer. In order to solve these issues, this work conceives a novel protocol architecture that successfully integrates and properly customizes the key functionalities of Information-Centric Networking, Multi-access Edge Computing, and Software Defined Networking paradigms. Specifically, the designed approach envisages that (1) Multi-access Edge Computing assists mobile consumers in retrieving data, while transparently managing the information-centric communication primitives and recovering the synchronization with the remote producer after the handover, (2) Software-Defined Controllers dynamically configure forwarding functionalities, and (3) Information-Centric Networking enables efficient data dissemination and delivers network control instructions. The impact of the devised protocol architecture on the communication overhead is analytically formulated and evaluated in scenarios with different topology, mobility, application settings, and number of mobile consumers. The comparison with respect to the pure Information-Centric Networking deployment demonstrates that the proposed solution ensures a reduction of the communication overhead up to 99.99% on the data plane, an overall bandwidth saving up to 99.93%, and a not negligible memory saving in intermediary routers. At the same time, the adoption of information-centric communication primitives for the control plane achieves an overhead reduction ranging from 29.36% to 51.13% with respect to an implementation based on the conventional OpenFlow protocol.

ANDSF-Assisted vertical handover decisions in the IEEE 802.11/LTE-Advanced network

To address the challenging issues of energy-efficiency and seamless connectivity in heterogeneous networks, 3GPP and IEEE have recently incorporated several architectural and functional enhancements to the baseline operation of their standards for cellular and wireless local area network access, respectively. Based on the 3GPP Access Network Discovery and Selection Function (ANDSF) as well as the advanced measurement capabilities provided by the IEEE 802.11-2012 and the 3GPP Long Term Evolution–Advanced (LTE-A) Standards, we propose an ANDSF-assisted energy-efficient vertical handover decision algorithm for the heterogeneous IEEE 802.11-2012 / LTE-A network. The proposed algorithm enables multi-mode mobile terminals to select and associate with the network point of attachment that minimizes the average overall power consumption at the mobile terminal and guarantees a minimum supported quality of service for its ongoing connections. System-level simulations demonstrate the performance of the proposed algorithm and compare it against that of other competing solutions.

MobilityFirst

MobilityFirst is a future Internet architecture with mobility and trustworthiness as central design goals. Mobility means that all endpoints -- devices, services, content, and networks -- should be able to frequently change network attachment points in a seamless manner. Trustworthiness means that the network must be resilient to the presence of a small number of malicious endpoints or network routers. MobilityFirst enhances mobility by cleanly separating names or identifiers from addresses or network locations, and enhances security by representing both in an intrinsically verifiable manner, relying upon a massively scalable, distributed, global name service to bind names and addresses, and to facilitate services including device-to-service, multicast, anycast, and context-aware communication, content retrieval, and more. A key insight emerging from our experience is that a logically centralized global name service can significantly enhance mobility and security and transform network-layer functionality. Recognizing and validating this insight is the key contribution of the MobilityFirst architectural effort.

English

The host identity implies also a change in the internet architecture. HIP creates a conceptual layer between the network and transport layers. With this architectural change,transport level associations can be bound to an identifier representing the host rather than the topological location of it. This has profound impacts on handling mobility and multihoming[24]. The current internet architecture is based on the assumption that hosts have a single static network attachment point. This was a reasonable supposition at the time internet architecture was developed. However, it no longer applies as mobility and multihoming are becoming all the more variable and desirable in networking.

A Survey of Mapping Systems for Locator/Identifier Split Internet Routing

The locator/identifier split is a core principle of many recently proposed routing architectures for a scalable future Internet. It splits the function of today's IP addresses into two separate pieces. End-hosts are addressed using identifiers which are not globally routable while network attachment points have globally routable locators assigned. In most architectures, either the sending host or an intermediate node has to query a mapping system to obtain locators for identifiers. Such a mapping system must be fast, reliable, secure, and may be able to relay data packets. In this paper, we propose requirements and a general taxonomy for mapping systems and use it to provide a survey on recent proposals. We address general aspects of mapping systems and point out remaining research opportunities.

LISP-MN: Mobile Networking Through LISP

The current Internet architecture was not designed to easily accommodate mobility because IP addresses are used both to identify and locate hosts. The Locator/Identifier Separation Protocol (LISP) decouples them by considering two types of addresses: EIDs that identify hosts, and RLOCs that identify network attachment points and are used as routing locators. LISP, with such separation in place, can also offer native mobility. LISP-MN is a particular case of LISP which specifies mobility. In this paper we provide a comprehensive tutorial on LISP-MN, showing its main features and how it compares to existing mobility protocols.

Securing Control Signaling in Mobile IPv6 with Identity-Based Encryption

Control signaling messages in Mobile IPv6 are mainly used to inform the home agent (HA) and the correspondent node (CN) about the mobile node’s (MN’s) new address when its network attachment point is changed. In order to prevent various security attacks, these messages must be protected. In the current standard, the control sig naling messages between a HA and a MN are authenticated using IPSec, often with IKEv2 and X.509 certificates. Control signaling messages between a MN and a CN are currently protected by an effective but insecure protocol, known as Return Routability. Using IBE (Identity-Based Encryption) for authenticating control signaling messages requires more processing power but significant security enhancements are achieved. The current protocols for protecting control signal ing messages are outlined in this paper. Proposed approaches for implementing IBE-authentication between a MN and a HA as well as between a MN and a CN are presented. Environments where the MN and the CN use the same Public Key Generator (PKG) as well as environments where they use different PKGs are taken into account. Finally, the performance of some proposed signaling protocols is estimated. An overview of IBE is given and the elements and operations needed to set up an IBE infrastructure are described in an appendix.

Fast MIPv6 extensions supporting seamless multicast handovers

This paper presents the application of appropriate extensions to the Fast Handovers for Mobile IPv6 (FMIPv6) protocol that enable mobile nodes to execute seamless multicast remote subscriptions while changing their network attachment point. The proposed handover supporting mechanism achieves minimization of the multicast service disruption period by suggesting the conditional tunneling of multicast traffic among the network nodes involved in the procedure. Tunneling is performed after the establishment of multicast membership information at the access router at which the mobile is anticipated to attach, but before the actual handover execution. In this way the mobile is enabled to receive the requested multicast traffic immediately after its attachment to the new network. The paper presents quantitative comparative OPNET simulation results, extracted from an IEEE 802.11 WLAN indoor simulation topology. Performance results are provided for metrics such as the service disruption time perceived by video streaming recipients executing inter-domain handovers and the effort consumed for tunneling, while varying parameters such as the link-layer trigger generation process configuration, the inter-access network delay and the mobile's speed. The performed evaluation shows that the proposed mechanism attains better performance in comparison to a similar mechanism, to the expense of a slight increase of the resource expenditure for the proactive to handover tunneling purposes. Furthermore, a vulnerability of the FMIPv6 protocol to the handover control and prediction mechanisms has been identified, presenting however possible ways to deal with it.

Seamless multicast mobility support using fast MIPv6 extensions

This paper elaborates on seamless handover support for wireless IP multicast networks with the use of a novel mobility management mechanism. The latter enables mobile nodes with active multicast sessions to execute seamless remote subscriptions while changing their network attachment point and is formulated by extending the unicast “Fast Handovers for Mobile IPv6” protocol (FMIPv6). The proposed scheme minimizes service disruption due to handover, by using conditional tunneling of multicast traffic on a per flow (rather than per mobile node) basis. Moreover, a simple buffering technique is proposed, enabling the temporary storage of the tunneled before the handover packets thus eliminating packet loss occurring during the link layer handover period. Also, multicast traffic recipients experience reduced handover latency due to the timely configuration of the network routers providing the multicast service. The performance of the proposed mechanism is evaluated by OPNET simulation results, for realistic IEEE 802.11 WLAN indoor simulation scenarios, incorporating spatially correlated shadowing for the propagation environment and random mobility of users. Performance results are provided in terms of service disruption time perceived by video streaming recipients as well as tunneling and buffering overhead for handover support, while varying the FMIPv6 protocol triggering configuration, the inter-domain distance and the access router buffering capacity. The performance evaluation reveals a significant reduction in the handover packet loss level when compared to similar multicast mobility schemes, causing a slight increase of resource consumption for tunneling and buffering purposes.

Monitoring emerging IPv6 wireless access networks

Foreseeing a future where IPv6 and mobile terminals play an important role in public access communication networks, this article introduces a monitoring system capable of identifying relevant traffic flows and tracking them while terminal equipment moves between network attachment points. The mobile flows are characterized and represented so that individual users and flows can perceive the quality of service they receive, and operators can have global traffic views of their heterogeneous access networks.

MobiCom poster

This poster describes a new approach to host mobility, where the responsibility of maintaining an end-to-end pipe that survives changes to the host network attachment point is moved to the transport layer.