Seamless mobility and applications in the Internet

As one aspect in the seamless provisoning of IP services in the presence of heterogeneous access networks, the discovery of physically nearby access routers is a crucial problem in order to determine the target of a mobile device’s IP-level handover from the currently serving access router. The existence of heterogeneous networks makes the presence of different administrative domains very likely. As a consequence, the known information regarding the logical IP distance does not suffice since logically nearby access routers might be physically far from each other. In this problem space, I’ve been working in the area of Candidate Access Router (CAR) discovery. Within the SEAMOBY working group of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), a solution for this problem was developed throughout the course of the years 2001 to 2004. In this, I was involved in the problem statement as well as the requirements for the protocol solutions in this space. Moreover, a solution draft for this problem was submitted in March 2003, which was eventually merged into the final WG solution.

In another area of seamless mobility, I’ve been working on solutions to relocate service functionality throughout the mobile device’s movement. In this, the  Application Context Transfer Framework was developed as a solution framework that allows such relocation of higher level service functionality (presented at ICC 2003).