Paths to Mobility Support in the Future Internet

Abstract

The efficient support of various mobility types is one of the main challenges in anticipating evolutions towards the Future Internet. The European 4WARD project applies a "clean-slate" architectural approach where the Generic Path, a new communication abstraction, organizes the necessary cooperation between nodes for realising a wide range of communication services from unicast/multicast conversational services to multi point transfer between cooperating information objects. Our work addresses the challenges of supporting different mobility types in the context of Generic Paths by elaborating innovative schemes that will be further evaluated and combined in a second step. The Dynamic Mobility Anchoring proposal considers the distribution of mobility anchors in Access Nodes realising the necessary traffic indirection when hosts connectivities change. Anchorless mobility applies a more abstract approach where so called compartment are used to realise dynamic bindings between end points. A main issue for supporting wide scale mobility is the availability of a common namespace and an efficient resolution scheme. We address this issue with a high focus. Lastly considering mobile ad hoc networking as a key environment for its high level of dynamicity, we envisage the application of end to end concurrent multi-path transfer methods in such a context. Our research opens several future perspectives such as further designing, evaluating, refining and combining the different innovations and algorithms in a coherent mobility framework for Generic Paths.