This paper describes the SDN-based L4S solution, a congestion control algorithm designed to improve QoS in 5G and Beyond networks. Inspired by the IETF specifications, our framework tackles challenges prevalent in immersive applications like video streaming and cloud gaming, such as ultra-low latency and packet loss. The proposed solution seamlessly integrates L4S techniques into SDN, thereby optimizing queue management within the transport network. Additionally, it employs Explicit Congestion Notification (ECN) to mark packets during congestion scenarios. This synergistic approach facilitates dynamic adjustments in transmission rates, enhancing the overall efficiency of the transport network, particularly in accommodating various classes of traffic. Evaluation results demonstrate that our solution outperforms the benchmarks by a substantial margin in terms of End-to-End latency, and packet loss.

In this paper, we unveil the Software-Defined Low Latency (SDLL) framework based on Software-Defined Networking (SDN) to provision the Quality of Service (QoS) and guarantee ultra-low latency in 5G and beyond Transport Networks (TN). SDLL aims to tackle Time Sensitive Networking (TSN)'s weaknesses by providing agility and flexibility in terms of Traffic Engineering (TE) and Queue Management (QM) to guarantee low end-to-end (E2E) latency even under congested links. SDLL provides a flexible and on-demand way to change end-to-end paths and queue configurations (ex., add or remove queues). We conducted extensive experimentation by implementing SDLL using Open Network Operating System (ONOS) and Open vSwitch (OVS) tools and comparing its performances against two standard solutions: SDN Shortest Path (SDNSP) (one queue per port) and Software-Defined QoS (SDQoS) (three queues per port). Obtained results indicate that SDLL can guarantee low E2E latency compared to the two other solutions, particularly when: (1) the links are congested and (2) many low-latency critical services are run in parallel.

This paper proposes a novel approach to Software-Defined Networking (SDN) Admission Control (AC) based on Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) for Beyond 5G (B5G). AC is a critical function in SDN, as it determines which traffic flow to pass by the network and which should be rejected. GNNs are a type of Neural Networks (NNs) that are able to learn how to make real-time AC decisions by training on pre-existing data, including network topologies and traffic characteristics. The solution we propose is made of two layers: (i) Network Delay Predictor (NetDelP) leveraging on the RouteNet-Fermi GNN model, used to predict the network latency for different topologies and traffic patterns. (ii) Admission Control Agent (AdConAgt) supporting the SDN and used to regulate the traffic flow in the network. The outlined concept is able to manage large-scale and complex topology networks with optimized Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) such as network latency and Packet Loss Rate (PLR). The envisioned approach is evaluated with various network topology scales and classes of traffic. The obtained results outperform the SDN-Shortest Path (SDN-SP) solution by demonstrating the ability of our proposal to guarantee the End-To-End (E2E) latency and prevent link congestion in order to meet the QoS requirements.

Edge computing is one of the key technology of the last decade, enabling several emerging services beyond 5G (e.g., autonomous driving, robotic networks, Augmented Reality (AR)) requiring high availability and low latency communications. While in cloud native paradigm, highly embraced by cloud providers, network functions and applications are decomposed into microservices run in a container. Defacto container orchestration engine, namely Kubernetes, deploys multiple containers inside a pod. The mapping between microservices and pod highly affects the availability and latency of deployed microservices and hence the run application. In this paper, we propose novel availability and latency-aware deployment models for an edge service composed of multiple applications designed as multiple microservices. The two considered deployments are analyzed and evaluated using experimentation and an analytical model, considering critical performance criteria for edge-oriented services, like availability and latency requirements.

Edge computing is one of the critical components enabling low-latency demanding services in beyond 5G networks. Indeed, the deployed applications at the edge benefit from their close position to end-users to guarantee low latency access. Considering the case of a network slicing enabled network, we introduce Lightweight edge Slice Orchestration (LeSO) frame-work, a cloud-native oriented orchestrator that orchestrates and manages the deployment of micro-services as sub-slices at the edge. Whilst the existing orchestration frameworks are greedy of computing resource consumption and fail to integrate with the Multi-access Edge Computing (MEC) domain, LeSO by design is very lightweight and integrates a MEC platform-like component to guarantee traffic steering to automate edge slice deployment. Experiment results show that LeSO necessities a small amount of CPU and memory, even when a high number of edge slices are deployed.

At early market penetration, automated vehicles will share the road with legacy vehicles. For a safe transportation system, automated vehicle controllers therefore need to estimate the behavior of the legacy vehicles. However, mismatches between the estimated and real human behaviors can lead to inefficient control inputs, and even collisions in the worst case. In this paper, we propose a framework for evaluating the impact of model mismatch by interfacing a controller under test with a driving simulator. As a proof- of-concept, an algorithm based on Model Predictive Control (MPC) is evaluated in a braking scenario. We show how model mismatch between estimated and real human behavior can lead to a decrease in avoided collisions by almost 46%, and an increase in discomfort by almost 91%. Model mismatch is therefore non-negligible and the proposed framework is a unique method to evaluate them.

A centralized controller computes controls and transmits them to automated vehicles. In case of a communication failure, control values will be missing and vehicles might take incorrect driving decisions. Although modern controllers may resist spurious communication errors, burst errors are expected to be more challenging. This paper introduces a centralized controller robust to burst errors. We propose a model predictive controller (MPC) computing intended future controls and sharing them with vehicles to be stored in a buffer. Through such buffer, vehicles may still retrieve control values even under burst errors. The proposed concept is evaluated in a mixed multi vehicle braking scenario and its superiority over other approaches in terms of distance and acceleration errors compared is shown.

The Internet of Things (IoT) has accelerated the innovations in the connected car domain. Together with Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS), the IoT technologies envision unleashing efficient and more sustainable transportation systems. A connected car is already considered as an IoT resource whose capabilities can be exposed through an IoT platform, but few testbeds provide full-stack, cloud-based environment for connected car services experimentation. This paper formulates several research and engineering challenges for developing such testbed. Our proposed testbed exploits the IoT and microservices to provide advanced functionalities such as (i) the integration of heterogeneous sensors and vehicular communication technologies in a complete end-to-end stack and (ii) an Edge Server for vehicular data annotation, local processing with actuation. The testbed exposes the vehicular resources securely through a Cloud based framework and open APIs. They are supported by The Web of Things (WoT) based interoperable descriptions of vehicular devices and interactions among relevant actors. Finally, the Cloud system deploys the connected car services using microservices philosophy. In addition to that, we present a functional IoT architecture of the testbed, describe its operational phases, novel aspects, prototyping and experimentation details.

Delay/Disruption Tolerant Networks target environments suffering from the instability or lack of end-to-end paths. Store-carry-and forward principle aims to sustain data sessions, and data replication to increase the probability of on-time delivery. However, these techniques require efficient scheduling and buffer management, to comply with limited resources availability (i.e., communication duration, storage). Multiple existing schemes aim to improve, or even optimize the resources usage. Nevertheless, their majority considers equally important application sessions. The few proposals considering different traffic classes, fail to provide real QoS guarantees. In this paper, we formulate the problem of maximizing the performance, subject to distinct QoS constraints (requirements) for each application class. We consider requirements related to delivery probability and delay. Then, we propose a distributed algorithm which: (i) guarantees satisfaction of the individual constraints, when this is feasible given the available resources, and (ii) allocates any remaining resources optimally, to maximize the desired performance metric. We first consider homogeneous mobility, and then extend our analysis to heterogeneous contact rates and sparse contact graphs, that better correspond to real life mobility. Simulation results, based on synthetic and real mobility scenarios, support our theoretical claims and show that our policy outperforms other existing schemes (i.e., ORWAR [1] and CoSSD [2] ).

Mobile Edge Computing (MEC) consists of deploying computing resources (CPU, storage) at the edge of mobile networks; typically near or with eNodeBs. Besides easing the deployment of applications and services requiring low access to the remote server, such as Virtual Reality and Vehicular IoT, MEC will enable the development of context-aware and context-optimized applications, thanks to the Radio API (e.g. information on user channel quality) exposed by eNodeBs. Although ETSI is defining the architecture specifications, solutions to integrate MEC to the current 3GPP architecture are still open. In this paper, we fill this gap by proposing and implementing a Software Defined Networking (SDN)-based MEC framework, compliant with both ETSI and 3GPP architectures. It provides the required data-plane flexibility and programmability, which can on-the-fly improve the latency as a function of the network deployment and conditions. To illustrate the benefit of using SDN concept for the MEC framework, we present the details of software architecture as well as performance evaluations.

Content Centric Networking (CCN) is an important aspect of the Future Internet Architecture. CCN investigates the evolution from current host-centric network architecture of IP to data centric networking architecture. This paper aims at demonstrating the integration of Named Data Networking (NDN) mechanism, an instantiation of CCN, in previously developed DataTweet Internet of Things (IoT) architecture. The main accomplishment is in achieving and demonstrating interworking between the NDN and IoT paradigms. We briefly describe the identified challenges, their solutions and a real prototype showcasing the integration of NDN into the DataTweet IoT Architecture. Early results about performance evaluation and future works are outlined.

International audience

During recent years, we have witnessed an explosion in the Internet of Thing (IoT) in terms of the number and types of physical devices. However, there are many limitations of these devices regarding their computing power, storage, and connection capabilities. They affect on-device processing of sensed data significantly. Centralized treatment of IoT data has proven challenging for many use cases demanding real time response. This paper aims at augmenting sensor data processing using the concept of virtual sensors. We propose a scalable virtual sensor framework that supports building a logical dataflow (LDF) by visualizing either physical sensors or custom virtual sensors. The process produces high-level information from the sensed data that can be easily perceived by machines and humans. A web-based virtual sensor editor (VSE) is also implemented on the top of the framework to simplify creation and configuration of the LDF. The VSE supports cross-platform and real-time verification for composed LDF. The paper also presents a catalog of supported virtual sensor type along with preliminary performance study.

Cloud-RAN (CRAN) is considered as one key enabler for beyond 4G networks, offering multiplexing gains, and advanced cooperation and coordinated signal processing. However, a key obstacle in the adoption of the CRAN architecture is that it requires very high capacity and low latency fronthaul (FH) links to carry raw I/Q samples between remote radio heads (RRH) and the baseband units (BBUs). These capacity requirements could be reduced by a more flexible split of baseband processing between BBUs and RRHs. Nevertheless, while moving some of the processing back into the RRH is expected to reduce FH rates, the amount of reduction mainly depends on the split, cell load, scenario and it might also introduce some delays. To this end, this paper studies the impact of different functional splits on the FH capacity for representative scenarios. Furthermore, we propose the use of a packet-based fronthaul network and study the joint impact of different packetization methods and RRH-BBU functional splits on the FH rate and latency. Based on this study, we provide some insights on the feasibility and optimality of different combinations, and the potential multiplexing benefits in terms of numbers of RRHs one could support over a single Ethernet-based FH network.

Software-Defined Networking (SDN) is transforming the networking ecosystem. SDN allows network operators to easily and quickly introduce new services and flexibly adapt to their requirements, while simplifying the network management to reduce the cost of operation, maintenance and deployment. On the other hand, mobility is a key aspect for the future mobile networks. In this context, Distributed Mobility Management (DMM) has been recently introduced as a new trend to overcome the limitations of the today's mobility management protocols which are highly centralized and hierarchical. Driven from the fact that DMM and SDN share the same principle in which the data and control plane are decoupled, we propose a DMM solution based on SDN architecture called S-DMM. This solution offers a lot of advantages including no need to deploy any mobility-related component at the access router, independence of the underlying technologies, and per-flow mobility support. On one hand, the numerical results prove that S-DMM is more scalable than the legacy DMM. On the other hand, the experiment results from a real implementation show that S-DMM comes at no performance penalty (in terms of handover latency and end-to-end delay) compared to legacy DMM, yet at a slightly better management cost, which makes S-DMM a promising candidate for a mobility management solution in the context of 5G networks.

Handover procedure in LTE/LTE-A has been radically evolved when compared to the previous 3GPP standards. In particular, X2 handover is introduced to allow neighboring eNBs to handle the user mobility without the involvement of the core network. While most of the application could considerably benefit from the X2 handover performance improvement, delay breakdown and impact of parameters from the UE perspective are not well investigated. This paper analyzes the performance of the X2 handover from the UE perspective. Furthermore, the impact of the different parameters on the handover decision algorithm is investigated. Preliminary results, obtained from the OpenAirInterface LTE/LTE-A emulation platform, demonstrate that main delay bottleneck resides in the uplink synchronization of the UE to the target eNB.

Vehicles are becoming the next frontiers for Internet of Things (IoT) based platforms and services. Connected vehicles, Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) together with IoT technologies have the potential of unleashing efficient and more sustainable transportation system which is fast becoming an important societal challenge. This paper formulates several main research and engineering challenges for integrating connected vehicles into IoT ecosystems. The challenges include - (i) a suitable alternative of cloud platform to support real time connected vehicular scenarios, (ii) uniform description and data collection mechanisms from vehicular sensors, (iii) integrating smart devices into transport systems, (iv) uniform mechanism for data fusion and analytics and (v) integrating all heterogeneous elements into a standard IoT architecture for connected vehicles. To mitigate these challenges, we propose a novel IoT framework. The solutions, operational phases of the framework, software elements & their implementations and advantages are described in details. The building blocks of the framework are integrated into an oneM2M standard architecture. Finally, the paper concludes with best practice recommendations and lessons learnt from the prototyping.

Recent challenges in Internet of Things (IoT) include — (i) providing interoperability among IoT data, (ii) interpreting data generated by IoT devices, and (iii) assisting developers in accomplishing these tasks. Current standard development organizations such as oneM2M are designing semantic-based IoT architecture to address such challenges. However, the recent release of oneM2M standards does not provide any concrete tool for the semantic treatment of the IoT data. Previously, we proposed the Machine-to-Machine Measurement (M3) Framework which mitigates the challenges and assist developers in building semantic based IoT applications easily. Considering the usefulness and novel aspects of the M3 framework, the paper proposes to integrate it seamlessly into oneM2M architecture. The semantic requirements from oneM2M are pointed out and the M3 components addressing them are identified. A common service function (CSF) dedicated to semantic engine is introduced to the oneM2M architecture which extends the capabilities of common services entity (CSE) in terms of semantic treatment of IoT data. The new CSF also includes a catalog of semantic based IoT templates which are exploited by Application Entities to easily utilize the semantic engine. Two deployment scenarios of the upgraded oneM2M architecture have been discussed. Finally these extensions have been communicated to the oneM2M Management, Abstraction and Semantics (MAS) Group (Working Group 5).

Delay and Disruption Tolerant Networks (DTNs) have been proposed for challenging environments where the instability or lack of end-to-end paths is the rule rather than the exception. In this context, the principle of store-carry-and forward is used to sustain data sessions under intermittent connectivity, and data replication to increase the probability of on-time delivery. However, these techniques create the need for efficient scheduling and buffer management techniques, as the data load is generally larger than the amount of the available resources (i.e. bandwidth per communication opportunity, and buffer storage). A number of recent schemes have been proposed to make forwarding decisions that improve or even optimize the usage of these resources, in one way or another. Nevertheless, the majority of these schemes consider application sessions (and thus data messages) of equal importance. Furthermore, the few proposals that consider different traffic classes, do so in a somewhat "ad-hoc" manner, failing to provide real QoS guarantees. To this end, in this paper we formulate the problem of maximizing the network performance, in a limited resource network, subject to constraints corresponding to distinct QoS requirements (e.g., delivery probability) for each application class. Based on this formulation, we propose a distributed algorithm which: (i) guarantees that the individual QoS constraints are satisfied, when this is feasible given the amount of available resources, and (ii) allocates any remaining resources optimally, so as to maximize the desired performance metric. Simulation results, based on synthetic and realistic mobility scenarios, support our theoretical claims and further show that our policy outperforms other existing QoS prioritization schemes.

Distributed Mobility Management (DMM) is a new trend to overcome the limitations of the current IP mobility management protocols raised by the rapid increasing mobile Internet usages. It is based on the idea of flattening the network architecture and providing mobility service when it is necessary. Although DMM outperforms the well known protocol - Proxy Mobile IPv6 (PMIPv6) in terms of optimizing the network resources consumption, the DMM deployment faces several challenges such as complex address and tunnel management, high signaling cost and high handover latency when the number of addresses and tunnels associated with the mobile node increase (e.g., in case of users moving at a high speed). For this reason, we introduce a hybrid centralized-distributed mobility management architecture (H-DMM) for supporting highly mobile users. The numerical results showed that H-DMM can retain the advantages of DMM while limiting its drawback in comparison with PMIPv6 in terms of signaling cost, packet delivery cost, handover latency and end-to-end delay even in case of users with highly mobility features.

Commoditization and virtualization of wireless networks are changing the economics of mobile networks to help network providers (e.g., MNO, MVNO) move from proprietary and bespoke hardware and software platforms toward an open, cost-effective, and flexible cellular ecosystem. In addition, rich and innovative local services can be efficiently created through cloudification by leveraging the existing infrastructure. In this work, we present RANaaS, which is a cloudified radio access network delivered as a service. RANaaS provides the service life-cycle of an on-demand, elastic, and pay as you go 3GPP RAN instantiated on top of the cloud infrastructure. We demonstrate an example of real-time cloudified LTE network deployment using the OpenAirInterface LTE implementation and OpenStack running on commodity hardware as well as the flexibility and performance of the platform developed.

In the mobile era, the demand for Internet connection for moving vehicles (such as cars, buses and subways) is growing fast. The Network Mobility (NEMO) basic support protocol (B-NEMO) was introduced to provide Internet access for a group of users in a moving vehicle in an effective manner. As an extension of Mobile IPv6 (MIPv6), B-NEMO inherits the limitations from both the host-based and the centralized mobility management protocol such as sub-optimal routing (especially, in the nested NEMO scenario), reliability and scalability issues. Recently, Distributed Mobility Management (DMM) has been introduced as a new trend to overcome the limitations of the centralized mobility management protocols. However, DMM may not be a suitable scheme for moving vehicles since it faces several challenges such as complex address and tunnel management, high signaling cost, and long handover latency in case of users moving at a high speed. In this document, we propose a hybrid centralized-distributed mobility management architecture in the context of NEMO. Our solution allows the devices to obtain connectivity either from fixed locations or mobile platforms (e.g., a NEMO) and move between them, while keeping their on-going flows. The numerical results showed that the solution helps keeping the advantages of DMM approach in terms of signaling cost, packet delivery cost, handover latency, and end-to-end delay even in the moving vehicle scenario.

Evolved Multimedia Broadcast Multicast Service (eMBMS) has recently attracted a great attention from the telecommunication industry. All big companies in the field have invested and intended to deploy eMBMS as the broadcast solution in response to the immense demand in multimedia traffic. The eMBMS, also known as LTE broadcast, can provide high quality live video streaming services for a large number of users simultaneously in an open area such as a stadium or arena during an entertainment or sport event. Nowadays, in a high mobility environment, maintaining the service reception for moving users becomes a crucial task for mobile operators and service providers. Unfortunately, the support from LTE standard for eMBMS service continuity is very limited at the moment and in many cases, the users cannot continue to receive their desired services. To overcome the limitation in the standard, this paper will present a novel method to ensure the service continuity as well as to reduce the service interruption time during handover period for eMBMS users in the mobility context.

The ever-increasing mobile Internet traffic has led to the development of a new IP mobility management concept in the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) - distributed mobility management (DMM). Based on the fact that the mobile Internet traffic will be dominated by the mobile video, the scalability and bandwidth efficiency from multicast routing makes the IP multicast play more important role. In DMM, IP multicast can be enabled by deploying the MLD proxy function at the mobility access router (MAR). The MAR at which the multicast flow is initiated is used as a multicast mobility anchor (MMA) for this flow. In case of mobility, the multicast traffic is tunneled from the anchor to the current MAR. As a result, the movement of the listener causes several issues for the ongoing multicast flow such as service disruption, non-optimal routing (end-to-end delay) and the tunnel convergence problem. In some cases, it is almost impossible to meet the requirements in terms of service disruption and delay (e.g., for the real-time and delay-sensitive services). In this paper, we introduce a dynamic MMA selection mechanism in order to mitigate these issues. The MMA selection takes into account such contexts as the multicast service, the mobile node's mobility and the network. Numerical results show that by selecting the appropriate MMA, these requirements can be satisfied even for services with stringent interruption and delay constraints.

Overall high power consumption in the mobile applications forces the mobile users to recharge frequently. Most of the Android applications do not implement any self-adaptive strategies that react to the battery level, status and context. Thus the applications continue to consume power even when battery is critically low. Intelligent control of hardware and software optimization based on the battery level is the key to power saving. This paper introduces a self-adaptive application development framework which proposes three profiles with various self-adaptive features for mobile applications. The framework employs an analyzer engine which decides the activation of appropriate profile based on battery and context information. The self-adaption takes place in four levels - hardware & software features adaption, user features adaption and additional optimization. When the battery is critically low, priority is given to maximize the battery life until next charging opportunity. Such implementation is highly desirable for mobile applications with high dependency on display hardware (e.g. games) and/or on network operations (e.g. YouTube, Dropbox). Prototype Android applications are developed and results show up to 40% reduction in application power consumption. Power Tutor has been used to get the power consumption results.

LTE 4G cellular networks are gradually being adopted by all major operators in the world and are expected to rule the cellular landscape at least for the current decade. They will also form the starting point for further progress beyond the current generation of mobile cellular networks to chalk a path towards fifth generation mobile networks. The lack of open cellular ecosystem has limited applied research in this field within the boundaries of vendor and operator R&D groups. Furthermore, several new approaches and technologies are being considered as potential elements making up such a future mobile network, including cloudification of radio network, radio network programability and APIs following SDN principles, native support of machine-type communication, and massive MIMO. Research on these technologies requires realistic and flexible experimentation platforms that offer a wide range of experimentation modes from real-world experimentation to controlled and scalable evaluations while at the same time retaining backward compatibility with current generation systems.

Mobile application development is becoming more challenging with diverse platforms and their software development kits. In order to reduce the cost of development and reach out to maximum users across several platforms, developers are migrating to cross platform application development tools. In this paper, we provide several decision criteria beyond the portability concerns for choosing suitable cross platform tool for application development. The desirable requirements in a cross platform framework are identified. A general architecture for cross platform application development is discussed. Then a survey of several write once run anywhere tools (PhoneGap, Titanium, Sencha Touch) are provided along with a classification and comparison among the tools. To examine the performance in terms of CPU, memory usage, power consumption, Android test applications are developed using such tools. It is found that PhoneGap consumes less memory, CPU and power since it does not included dedicated UI components. Finally the paper summarizes the contributions and concludes with some future directions.

In this work we propose a new scheduling approach designed from scratch to maximize heterogeneous computers usage and the event processing flow at the same time. The scheduler is built based on three fundamental concepts which introduces a new vision of discrete event simulation: 1) events are clustered according to their potential time parallelism on one hand and to their potential process and data similarity on the other hand. 2) events meta-data is enhanced with additional descriptor which simplifies and accelerates the scheduling decision. 3) the simulation is hybrid time-event driven rather than time- or event-driven. The concretization of our approach is denoted the H-scheduler which uses several processes to manage the event flow. Furthermore we propose a dynamic scheduling optimization which aims to further maximize the event flow. The combination of those features allows the H-scheduler to provide the highest efficiency rate compared to the majority of GPU and CPU schedulers. In particular it goes beyond the default Cunetsim Scheduler by 90% in average while it keeps a significant lead on existing simulators.

It is widely acknowledged that the key limitation to a raising market deployment of Electric Vehicles (EV) is correlated to the anxiety related to electric vehicle charging services (EVCS). From a user perspective, the electricity service should provide widely available and easily reachable charging stations with transparent payment options. From electricity operator perspective, charging vehicles should be well scheduled in time and space to avoid sudden burst of requests. Such EVCS should be conducted before reaching a charging station as well as ubiquitous and transparent to the mobility of EVs. An efficient heterogeneous communication system is then required. The centralized nature of the EVCS makes a network-based IP mobility such as PMIPv6 a good choice, first to make heterogeneous technologies transparent to the EVCS, but also hides the mobility of the EVs to the service. In this paper, we first present the mapping between the charging type and use cases of the EVCS. We then describe the required extensions to PMIPv6 to be integrated to the EVCS, and finally via a near-to-real testbed show that the EVCS satisfies the data delivery time required by the IEEE 1646.

The growth in mobile devices and mobile traffic in which multimedia is a main type of traffic leads the mobile network to become more flattened. A new mobility management, called distributed mobility management (DMM), has been proposed to cope with the flat IP architecture. While DMM is a potential solution in terms of IP mobility management to deal with a huge number of wireless devices and traffic, IP multicast can be seen as a promising service for enhancing the efficiency of multimedia content delivery. Considering IP multicast listener mobility in a DMM environment, there exist some issues. Several proposals have been introduced to solve these issues, however, mainly for Proxy Mobile IPv6 (PMIPv6) networks. These proposals also remain unable to tackle all the multicast listener-related issues at the same time. Moreover, there are several limitations when these proposals are considered in a DMM environment. In this paper, a complete solution is introduced for all of these issues by taking the different proposals into account in an appropriate way in a DMM environment. This solution can also be applied for multicast source mobility.

Recently, a base solution has been adopted for supporting multicast listener mobility in Proxy Mobile IPv6 (PMIPv6). This solution brings multicast listener support into PMIPv6 by placing multicast routing functions at LMA while MAGs provide MLD proxy functions. Nevertheless, it does not address specific optimizations and performances issues such as handover latency, tunnel overhead, non-route optimization, etc. Specially, this paper focuses on handover performance in terms of service disruption time. The theoretical and simulation results show that through the utilization of multicast context transfer the service disruption time can be reduced significantly. By tuning the behavior of the IGMP/MLD for routers, we can also achieve a similar result, but make a dramatically increasing multicast-signaling. Thus, the impact of multicast-related signaling on the wireless link is studied to suggest the maximum number of listeners supported by one MAG. An enhanced multicast context transfer function is also proposed for group multicast mobility to reduce the number of signaling messages.

Proxy Mobile IPv6 (PMIPv6) takes advantage of the network-based mobility management that provides mobility support for moving nodes (MNs) without their involvement. However, the main drawback of PMIPv6 is that the inter-domain handover is not supported. That means when an MN moves to another PMIPv6 domain, the on-going sessions cannot be maintained. Although several proposals have been introduced for the inter-domain mobility support, they still have some limitations such as sub-optimal routing, signaling overhead, handover latency and lack of granularity on the mobility management service. In this paper, we propose the inter-domain mobility solutions based on the concept of the distributed mobility management (DMM) to overcome these limitations. Basically, DMM brings the mobility anchors closer to the users, thus avoiding such issues as sub-optimal routing, signaling overhead and dynamically providing the mobility service. Using the DMM concept, we have considered two approaches: partially or fully distributed. A performance analysis is studied based on a well-known factor, namely a session-to-mobility ratio which represents the relative ratio of session arrival rate to the user mobility rate. Numerical results show that the partially distributed solution gives a better performance than the existing inter-domain handover solutions (e.g. integration of MIPv6 and PMIPv6) in terms of handover latency, signaling cost and tunnel usage.

This paper describes a new topology management and access control technique for wireless networks developed during Daniel's Camara PhD. The main purpose of the technique is to provide a stable and well managed topology, so that other protocols can be built on the top of it. Having a stable and predictable topology is a fundamental step to enable the real utilization of wireless networks, mainly for ad hoc and sensor networks. The proposed method is based on the economy concept of free market, more specifically, in the laws of supply and demand. Each role in the defined topology has a cost; nodes trade their attachment and role in the network. The system eventually reaches a Pareto optimal allocation, what is a fair and stable configuration for all the participants. The method is distributed and flexible. Just by changing a small vector of basic prices, we can shape drastically different network topologies. The method permits even the modification of the topology characteristics of already deployed networks. This kind of feature is specially appreciated in the context of Public Safety Networks (PSN). In this kind of network, the same rescue team may have drastically different needs, depending on the kind of disaster they are attending.

To enable the efficient and low latency machine-type communications (MTC) over long term evolution (LTE), a contention based access (CBA) method is proposed. With CBA, UEs transmit packets on the randomly selected resource without having any UE specific scheduled resources. To address the problem of collision caused by CBA in high traffic load, eNB exploits the MU-MIMO detection technique to decode radio network temporary identifier (RNTI) of the collided UEs and use this information to perform a regular scheduling in subsequent subframe. Detailed low layer signaling enhancement to implement CBA technique in current LTE specification (Rel. 10) is also presented. Simulation results demonstrate that the CBA significanlty outperforms the existing uplink channel access methods.

This paper presents a method to disseminate alert messages in the context of new emerging communication standards, such as LTE and Wave. The applications involving the broadcast of periodic messages, can be described using the MBMS (Multicast/Broadcast Multimedia Service). Public Safety alert systems perform one important task in the context of Public Safety Networks (PSNs). The method proposed here is responsible for delivering alert messages to the greatest number of people in a specified area. To accomplish this task a new method, Virtual Road Side Unit (vRSU) is proposed to help the authorities to reach isolated people. The system works even if the deployed structure is severed damaged, i.e. most part of the regular Road Side Units (RSU) are out of order. In our method nodes work cooperatively to propagate the message to other nodes, when re-propagating messages nodes, vRSUs, behave as regular RSUs.

A Public Safety Network (PSN) is a particular kind of wireless ad hoc network which provides a communication support for Public Safety Users. Use-cases are numerous in terms of both deployment scenarios (e.g. mobile or fixed, small or large scale) and services (Push To Talk, Mail reporting, video streaming). Extreme conditions encountered after an earth quake or floodings may impede the use of any communication infrastructure. Maintaining robust and efficient communications is such harsh conditions is a major challenge. QoS requirements lead previous studies towards TDMA based radio resource management combined with clustering techniques for scalability purposes. In this paper we investigate how both Push To-Talk and Mail Reporting services can be supported in such networks. The key contributions are threefold: i) identification of remaining issues within TDMA/Clustered networks ; ii) proposition of a novel radio resource management protocol ; iii) evaluation of performance gains of the novel solution. We show that both services (Push-To-Talk and Mail reporting) can be supported in a Public Safety Network and that our solution outperforms the previous ones. Finally, we present further identified targeted works to improve our solutions.

The IEEE Task Group has approved recently the 802.11p amendment to enable efficient short range communications for vehicular networks by introducing multiple enhancements at the physical and MAC layer. It defines a control frequency channel for control and most critical data packets and one or several service frequency channels for less critical packets. In this paper, we propose an analytical model for the 802.11p operations in the control frequency. It captures all suggested enhancements important for exchanging data packets generated by road safety applications. We showed through diverse simulations scenarios that our proposed model is able to reproduce expected results. We consider this work as an important step toward understanding the performance of 802.11p-based vehicular communications and the model can be employed in the simulations of safety applications in large scenarios.

This paper proposes a topology management mechanism for hierarchical group oriented networks. The key innovative aspect of this paper is to consider different interest groups in the clustering formation process. For administrative or performance reasons sometimes it is required to organize nodes, located in the same geographical area, into different groups. This group-oriented topology management provides optimal routing for group members as well as for the last miles communication, where you only need to broadcast the message once to reach the entire interest group. Furthermore, it significantly improves the service provided to upper layers by creating a stable network topology. For example, when establishing a Public Safety Networks (PSN) to handle a disaster scenario the communication from the rescue teams may have no interest, or relation, with the communication hold by the law enforcement teams. In this case it makes sense to divide the network in two subgroups to improve routing and simplifying the medium access control. Here we propose a hierarchical network architecture to enable the organization of nodes into multiple interest groups in the same geographical area. Through simulations, we will show that how this architecture could be adapted to different PSN requirements and what are the key parameters.

This work presents an auxiliary mechanism to aid in the distribution of warning messages for Emergency Alert Systems (EAS). The main objectives of the proposed mechanism are to speed up and broaden the warning messages distribution process to provide to the public faster access to crucial information. EAS are public safety message systems designed to enable authorities to address the population in case of an emergency. This kind of system has been in use for a long time, however traditionally they are composed of radio/TV broadcast messages or sirens spread through endangered regions. This system on the other hand addresses the next generation of EAS systems that will be based on wireless computer networks and satellite technologies. The method proposed here is a complementary way to spread warning messages that not only successfully broadens the EAS reachability but also significantly speeds up the messages distribution process.

Proxy Mobile IPv6 (PMIPv6) is a network-based mobility management protocol for localized domains, which has been actively standardized by the IETF NETLMM Working Group. PMIPv6 is starting to attract much attention among telecommunication and internet communities due to its salient features and it is expected to expedite the real deployment of IP-based mobility management. However, an experimental evaluation of PMIPv6 which analyzes the impact of its practical constrains is still missing. From their analysis it is possible to highlight the requirements for PMIPv6's real implementation and to accelerate the practical deployment of IP-based network mobility management. In this paper, we present an experimental evaluation of PMIPv6 under different implementation configurations and we evaluate their impact on the performance of PMIPv6 in a real test-bed.

The evolution of Internet and its hosts does not match anymore the current Internet architecture, designed when mobility, multihoming and security were not considered, and based on IP addresses with the double role of host's identity and host's topological location. In this paper we propose a secure global and localized mobility management scheme suitable for multihomed Mobile Nodes (MNs) and based on Host Identity Protocol (HIP) and Proxy Mobile IPv6 (PMIPv6). It merges the new identifier/locator split architecture proposed by HIP, especially designed for providing security and multihoming to MNs, with the micro-mobility management scheme of PMIPv6, which has been proposed for unmodified MNs with future Global Mobility Management (GMM) protocols. HIP-PMIPv6 combination has double benefits. On one side, it represents an efficient micro-mobility solution for HIP. On the other side, it provides a GMM scheme for PMIPv6, which supports intertechnology handover and multihoming together with security. The HIP-PMIPv6 scheme has been implemented in a real testbed and experimental results prove its viability.

We considered a single hop ad-hoc network consisting of N source-destination pairs. Each transmitter is endowed with a finite buffer and accepts packets from a Poisson distributed arrival process. The channel is described by a Markov chain. We investigate distributed algorithms for joint admission control, rate and power allocation aiming at maximizing the individual or the global throughput defined as the average information rate successfully received. The decisions are based on the statistical knowledge of the channel and buffer states of the other communication pairs and on the exact knowledge of their own channel and buffer states. The problems are formulated as a cooperative and noncooperative games and reduced to the mathematical framework of the variational inequalities problems. The proposed algorithms provide sizable improvements with respect to straightforward extension of decentralized algorithms for multiple access channels to ad hoc networks.

Topology management for public safety networks (PSNs) presents some particularities which make it a challenging problem. First, the main concerns for PSNs is rapid deployment and survivability. Second, the network requirements for different disaster scenarios may differ completely. This work describes a flexible distributed algorithm to perform network admission control and topology management for public safety wireless networks using as target architecture the network proposed by the CHORIST project [5]. The proposed algorithm is able, not only to dynamically adapt to different network requirements, but also to create homogeneous clusters, where the number of mobile routers attached to each cluster is roughly the same. The technique successfully creates and maintains the desired topology relying only on a simple and customized cost function.

Emergency Management is an important topic for research community worldwide, especially after recent major disasters. The problem of supporting mobility at the disaster site to rescue teams equipped with different heterogeneous access technologies and providing interoperability between different agencies and jurisdictions is still under investigation. In this work we propose to merge the advantages of IPv6 micro-mobility management of Proxy Mobile IPv6 (PMIPv6) with macro-mobility management, security, inter-technology handover and multi-homing features of Host Identity Protocol (HIP). This new approach applied to our proposed ad-hoc satellite and wireless mesh system architecture for emergency mobile communications can improve mobility, security, reliability and interoperability in Emergency Management domain.

This paper presents the implementation and evaluation of a distributed topology management algorithm for public safety networks (PSNs) to implement the CHORIST architecture. Topology management for this kind of network is a mission critical problem, for a mission critical network. PSNs are the networks installed by the authorities to coordinate relief/rescue efforts in case of disasters. The main concerns for PSNs are rapid deployment and survivability. The whole operation and teams coordination schema depends on how well deployed the network was and how stable and reliable the network is during its lifetime. The more stable the network structure is in a rescue operation field the better. The proposed algorithm is able to dynamically adapt to the nodes mobility thus maintaining the desired topology.

We considered a dense interference network with a large number (K → ∞) of transmitter-receiver pairs. Each transmitter is endowed with a finite buffer and accepts packets from an arrival process. Each transmitter-receiver link is a fading vector channel with N diversity paths whose statistics are described by a Markov chain. We investigate distributed algorithms for joint admission control, rate and power allocation aiming at maximizing the individual throughput defined as the average information rate successfully received. The decisions are based on the statistical knowledge of the channel and buffer states of the other communication pairs and on the exact knowledge of their own channel and buffer states. In the case of a finite number of communication pairs this problem is computationally extremely intensive with an exponential complexity in the number of users. Assuming that K,N → ∞ with constant ratio the algorithm complexity becomes substantially independent of the number of active communications and grows with the groups of users having distinct asymptotic channel statistics. The cross-layer design is investigated for different kind of decoders at the receiver. The benefits of a cross layer approach compared to a resource allocation ignoring the states of the queues are assessed. The performance loss due to the use of policies designed for asymptotic conditions and applied to networks with a finite number of active communications is studied.

This work extends Proxy Mobile IPv6 to support mobility to Mobile Nodes having standard IPv6 stack in Cluster Based Heterogeneous Wireless Mesh Architecture. We also propose an enhanced network-based IP-layer movement detection mechanism which allows the network to detect the attachment and the movement of each Mobile Node independently from the access technologies without any special support from Mobile Nodes. We implemented and evaluated the extensions in a virtual IPv6 wireless testbed using User-mode Linux ad Ns-2 Emulation. Some qualitative results are also provided to prove the correctness and the advantages of the proposals.

Seamless vertical handover is one of the major challenges toward seamless inter-networking between heterogeneous access networks. To perform seamless vertical handover even under bad radio conditions in network mobility (NEMO) environments, NEMO-SHO has been proposed as an IPv6 soft handover extension that allows packet bicasting via two different wireless links simultaneously. However, the performance gain for TCP traffic was limited because spurious TCP retransmissions were invoked due to the difference of bandwidth and transmission delay between the two links. This paper proposes adding flow control to the packet combining process in NEMO-SHO, which is called adaptive packet combining. Adaptive packet combining estimates packet arrival time from a slow link and delays packets coming from a fast link based on the estimation, which can hide the difference of bandwidth and transmission delay between two links from TCP without any modification on nodes inside a moving network. Adaptive packet combining is thus able to reduce spurious TCP retransmissions. Using 3G and IEEE802.11b link, our experiments show that adaptive packet combining achieves better TCP goodput than Make-Before-Break handover under lossy radio conditions.

The Always Best Connected (ABC) vision has always been about IP-based architecture and multiple simultaneous access technologies which can provide wireless bandwidth aggregation and load-balancing features in fully overlapped coverage areas. This paper presents an intelligent tunneling framework, referred to as virtual SCTP tunneling, which enables the ABC vision in Network Mobility (NEMO). The virtual SCTP tunneling framework supports tunnels with multi-homed endpoints and can multiplex packets to multiple radio interfaces on a per-packet basis for better performance. Besides, it reduces the tunneling overhead over radio interfaces in heavy-load situation thanks to the predictive packet bundling feature. We carry out the simulation in the multi-homing context under ns2 and observe different metrics, e.g. throughput and packet loss rate seen by the wireless network, and the average end-to-end delay seen by Local Fixed Nodes. The performance of the proposed framework is compared with that of the existing per- flow forwarding which uses flow binding and IP tunneling. It is shown that the virtual SCTP tunneling is advantageous over the existing per-flow forwarding, especially in heavy-load situation.

Within the extent of research activity in the field of vehicular networking, notwithstanding the quantity of simulative studies carried out on protocols performance, the impact of vehicular mobility characterization has been often overlooked. Realistic mobility models are seldom employed, and when used, no comment is usually provided on the different effects that such models have on the results with respect to simpler mobility descriptions. In this paper, we address this issue, and analyze the impact that various levels of details in vehicular mobility modeling have on the simulation of networking protocols.

Toward seamless inter-networking between cellular networks and Wireless LAN, one of the major challenges is seamless vertical handover between different access technologies. Even in heterogeneous access networks which provide combined radio coverage, users may still suffer from packet losses due to bad radio conditions during the handover. Eurecom IPv6 soft handover can reduce packet losses even in the case of vertical handover. Considering that Network Mobility (NEMO) has an advantage of hiding mobility functions from users involved, Eurecom IPv6 soft handover and NEMO are expected to provide a good combination. This paper proposes IPv6 soft handover extension for NEMO over heterogeneous access networks to achieve better performance for UDP and TCP traffic. The proposed method called NEMO-SHO uses two different interfaces simultaneously during vertical handovers, and provides good Quality of Service for the users regardless of the radio coverage quality. Using 3G and IEEE802.11b interfaces, our experiments show that NEMO- SHO can achieve better performances for UDP traffic and constant-bit-rate TCP traffic than Make-Before-Break handovers in lossy radio conditions. We find that in case of TCP traffic the performance gain of NEMO-SHO is more affected by the difference of bandwidth and transmission delay between the two links due to the larger amount of outstanding TCP segments.

Network-based localized mobility management (NetLMM) is considered as the future solution for the IP mobility management confined within the access network, as well as a solution for inter-access system handover between 3GPP and non-3GPP. In this paper, we enhance NetLMM to support simultaneous use of radio interfaces in 4G environments consisting of multi-interface mobile nodes and heterogeneous access technologies. All issues on how to manage and to use multiple interfaces simultaneously in NetLMM are identified. We present necessary enhancements for the network attachment and network detachment processes. It is pointed out that IP tunneling is not suitable for simultaneous access in NetLMM. Consequently, a new tunneling method, which is based on stream control transmission protocol (SCTP) and its extensions, referred to as virtual SCTP tunneling, is proposed. We show that that the new tunneling method is advantageous to both mobile users and network operators with the consideration of two scenarios, load-balancing and wireless bandwidth aggregation. Some simulation results are also provided in this paper as an early estimation of the new tunneling method.

Geo-localization information is a key component for providing location-based services for Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS). Generally obtained by GPS devices and transmitted by Wireless Vehicular Communications, geo-localization in ITS represents a promising approach to reach objectives such as an increased road safety, transport efficiency, or on-the-road services. Despite its popularity, the issue of the overhead generated by the transmission of geo-localization data has not been addressed by the ITS community. In this paper, we first discuss the format of the information provided by GPS devices and propose a flexible message structure for exchanging geo-localization data. Then, we illustrate the significant overhead generated by the transmission of such information and propose a compression method achieving up to 70% overhead reduction without loss of precision. We finally test our method on the OLSR routing protocol.

In this work, we present a cross-layer forwarding strategy (CLFS), which is based on the cooperation between the new IEEE 802.11e MAC protocol (EDCA) and the on-demand AODV routing protocol. The proposal aims to minimize the number of forwarding nodes (FN) by hop, in the network. By this way, we decrease the contention amount and we improve the medium utilization. The selection of FN is based on maximum battery level and queue occupancy. These informations are injected into routing requests and replies crossing nodes in the network. Then, each node is able to select the FN that will participate in path establishment. In order to maintain a fair node capability, the forwarding procedure is dynamically distributed and assigned to nodes in the network. Moreover, an adaptive transmission opportunity (ATXOP) mechanism is derived from the EDCA. It aims to share the transmission channel fairly according to traffic load of nodes. We demonstrate that CLFS has good network performance, specially in term of throughput that can be significantly improved. Moreover, it achieves a high degree of fairness among applications

In this work, we propose and analyze a backoff enhancement for IEEE802.11 DCF that is quasi-optimal under all traffic loads. First, we give a new analysis of DCF scheme under finite load conditions in single hop configuration and we provide an accurate delay statistics model that consider the self-loop probability in every backoff state. Then we introduce the constant-window backoff scheme and we compare its performance to IEEE802.11 DCF with Binary exponential backoff. The quasi-optimality of the proposed scheme under all traffic loads is illustrated and numerical results show that it increases both the throughput and fairness of IEEE 802.11 DCF while remaining insensitive to traffic intensity.

While most topology control protocols only address limited network mobility, we propose in this paper a quasi-localized topology control algorithm that considers mobility predictions in order to construct and maintain a power efficient topology without relying on periodic beacons. Indeed, a node is capable of extracting linear trajectories of its neighboring nodes based on their positions and velocities. Based on such information, a node obtains a local prediction of neighborhood evolution and can thereafter proactively adapt the topology without relying on periodic beacons. Maintenance is driven on a per-event basis. It is therefore only when a node changes course that messages are exchanged in order to adapt the structure. Our approach is able to create and keep a stable kinetic backbone at a linear message and time complexity. It also improves concurrent communications by providing a significant reduction on local power assignments, therefore reducing interferences, increasing battery life and improving the overall network lifespan.

Nowadays, the cross-layer design approach is an important concept in mobile ad-hoc networks which is adopted to solve several open issues. It aims to overcome MANET performance problems by allowing protocols belonging to different layers to cooperate and share network status information while still maintaining separated layers. Indeed, the mechanisms on how to access the radio channel are extremely important in order to guarantee QoS and improve application performance. In this work, we present a cross layer routing protocol called CLAE which is based on the cooperation between the on-demand AODV routing protocol and the new IEEE 802.11e MAC protocol (EDCA). This proposal aims to find the best path according to application requirements in terms of delay, bandwidth, route stability, etc. Without loss of generality, this paper focuses only on determining the path with the lowest delay. Each node periodically estimates the average transmission delay for each class of service defined by 802.11e. This information is injected into routing requests and replies crossing each node. The sender is then able to select the best path which fits its delay requirement. Furthermore, in order to overcome transient network characteristics due to new communications set up and mobility, we develop a new buffer management scheme for the audio class of service that aims to discriminate audio packets according to their tolerated end-to-end transfer delay and their current experienced delay. The simulation results demonstrate that our proposal improves the performance of delay-sensitive applications while maintaining a good packet delivery ratio of other traffics

The IEEE 802.11a technology is rapidly being deployed offering many advantages to users. However, the MAC protocol suffers problems, due to such as hidden nodes and capture effects, leading to degraded performance. The article investigates the impact of the users' distribution (uniform and micro-cluster) on the protocol fairness and performance.

WLAN systems such as IEEE 802.11a brings the end-user to the high-speed data rates within the limited coverage areas. Deploying the additional access points might extend the coverage as well as create inter-cell interference, thus reducing the network performance, as studied in this article through various scenarios of overlapping cells.

Mobile users are facing the fact that many heterogenous radio access technologies coexist, ranging from wireless LANs to cellular systems. No technology has emerged as a common and universal solution which makes the current trends today toward the design of all-IP wireless networks, where radio cells are under the control of IP access routers for signalling and data transmission. In such networks, an IP-device with multiple radio interfaces or software radio can roam between different radio networks regardless the heterogeneity of their radio access technologies. The design of an all-IP wireless network requires an efficient and flexible handover management. A major issue in handover control is reducing data losses and avoiding additional end to end transmission delays. In this paper we propose mechanisms to handle soft-handover management in the IP layer which can coexist with mobile IPv6 and allow efficient micro mobility management.

Abstract Wireless channels are highly affected by unpredictable factors such as cochannel interference, adjacent channel interference, propagation path loss, shadowing, and multipath fading. The unreliability of media seriously degrades the transmission quality. Automatic Repeat reQuest (ARQ) and Forward Error Correction (FEC) schemes are frequently used in wireless environments to reduce the high bit error rate of the channel. In this paper, we propose an adaptive error‐control scheme for wireless networks on the basis of dynamic variation of error‐control strategy as a function of the channel bit error rate, desired QoS, and number of receivers. Reed–Solomon codes are used throughout this study because of their appropriate characteristics in terms of powerful coding and implementation simplicity. Simulation results show that our adaptive error‐control protocol decreases the waste of bandwidth due to retransmissions or extra coding overheads while satisfying the QoS requirements of the receivers. Copyright © 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

This paper gives an overview of the French collaborative project SAMU, Advanced Services by Mastering UMTS, dedicated to developing enhanced services for users in a car. For that purpose, complementary research domains have been investigated such as radio resource management, IP over UMTS and the use of software agents. While field trials were planned in the project to validate the outputs of the abovementioned research areas over a UMTS experimental network, the general delay encountered by UMTS manufacturers led the project to investigate alternative experimentation. Hence, a UMTS-TDD software radio platform has been built to show IP based telematics applications over UMTS.

Wireless channels are highly affected by unpredictable factors such as cochannel interference, adjacent channel interference, propagation path loss, shadowing and multipath fading. The unreliability of media degrades the transmission quality seriously. Forward error correction (FEC) schemes are frequently used in wireless environments to reduce the high bit error rate of the channel. In this paper, we propose an adaptive FEC scheme for multicast communication in wireless networks based on dynamic variation of coding parameters as a function of the channel bit error rate, desired QoS in terms of reliability, number of receivers and efficiency in terms of bandwidth use. Reed-Solomon erasure codes are used throughout this study because of their appropriate characteristics in terms of powerful coding and implementation simplicity. We make a numerical analysis of a set of Reed-Solomon erasure codes. The observations made throughout this numerical analysis are the basic principals of our adaptive FEC scheme. Numerical results show that our adaptive scheme provides the best trade-off between transmission overhead and guaranteed QoS.

This paper presents an alternative simple loop-free bandwidth-efficient distributed routing algorithm for mobile ad hoc networks, denoted as distributed dynamic routing (DDR). Although DDR benefits from classical concepts like zone and forest, unlike previous solutions it achieves several goals at the same time. Firstly, it provides different mechanisms to drastically reduce routing complexity and improve delay performance. Secondly, it is infrastructureless in a strong sense: it does not even require a physical location information. Finally, zone naming is performed dynamically and broadcasting is reduced noticeably.