The exponential increase of mobile Internet traffic has been forcing the current mobile network architectures to evolve towards flatten network architectures with IP backhaul support. Hence, current centralized mobility management approaches need to be adapted to cope with flat network architectures. The distributed mobility management is a promising direction to cope with the flatten network architectures and distribution of content servers. Thus, the distributed IP mobility approaches are characterized and grouped into tunneling and host routing models. Both models are evaluated regarding performance and scalability through simulation in different scenarios. The outcome demonstrates that both models are valid for mobility management of future networks, depending on the users, the network and the sessions. Overall, the host routing provides a better data delivery performance than tunneling approaches, but a worst scalability. Regarding the tunneling approach, the AR anchoring has an opposite behavior to host routing, while the CN anchoring is the approach that provides the best tradeoff between performance and scalability. Moreover, the global mobility management can be easily supported by the coexistence of these different models, when tightly-coupled.

A large-scale urban sensing platform, composed of multiple Data Collection Units (DCUs) equipped with sensor hardware scattered accross the city, allows pervasive monitoring of environmental parameters. Gathering sensor data from a number of disparate locations at a backend server can be supported by delay-tolerant services provided by existing vehicular networks. Our real-world sensing platform takes advantage of an existing vehicular network with more than 400 vehicles equipped with On-Board Units (OBUs). A purposely-developed implementation of a delay tolerant service is installed in all elements involved in the communication flow, from DCUs to the backend server. In this demo, we showcase the full end-to-end data flow with the actual equipment being used in our real-world deployment. Data produced at a DCU is collected by an OBU installed in a vehicle and delivered to a Road-Side Unit (RSU), which then forwards the data to the backend server.

Conventional networks are deployed through hierarchical architectures, which in many cases deal with centralized mobility anchoring models to ensure IP session continuity and IP reachability to mobile devices. Current IP mobility management is based on a centralized and static mobility anchor, which is a single point of failure that can introduce long delays and high management signaling. IP mobility management needs to cope with the evolution of mobile network architectures towards flatten architectural models. Thus, novel distributed mobility models have been proposed to distribute the mobility anchors closer to the end-user.

The increase of mobile traffic and the new role of the users as active elements in the network require a new approach for network architectures to adopt more flatten models. However, current mobile IP approaches were developed assuming static and centralized models: a single entity is responsible for the mobile traffic, the signaling and the context information of a large amount of Mobile Nodes. We propose a new host-based mobility approach denoted as Dynamic Mobile IP Anchoring (DMIPA) that distributes mobility management functionalities among Access Routers (ARs) and MNs, and provides dynamic sessions anchoring. DMIPA is envisioned to support these novel flat network architectures, and it is able to provide global IP mobility to the users, independently of the access network, technology and Internet provider. Through an analytical model, we compare DMIPA against Mobile IPv6, which is the standard host-based mobility model for IPv6 networks. The evaluation shows that DMIPA achieves better results regarding the handover delay and the data delivery cost, while the signaling cost can also be reduced in networks with low loss probability.

This paper addresses the problematic of mobility management decomposition, as a first step towards the development of decentralized mobility management architectures. We propose and evaluate an IP mobility management solution based on the decoupling of data and control plane. We have carried out simulations, showing that the proposed approach can significantly reduce packet loss and reachability time for mobile nodes.

The demanding requirements of new real-time and mobile multimedia group-based applications (e.g. IPTV and video-conferencing) motivates the research for novel and efficient network architectures, able to fulfil service requirements and increase user experience. Multicast, despite its scalability issues, is the most suitable network technology for the delivery of multiparty content. Context-awareness is taken as a key feature in Next Generation Networks, enabling a management framework with a more comprehensive knowledge of the network, application and user. The challenge is how to use the available knowledge towards service personalization and network efficiency. This paper presents and evaluates an architecture that aims to provide personalized session content delivery to multiple mobile users, integrating different access and transport technologies. The architecture relies on an end-to-end context-aware communication framework able to dynamically react and adapt to context changes, through session and network reconfiguration. Our focus is on the transport network part, addressing a new level of scalable multiparty content delivery through the concepts of abstract multiparty trees and overlay nodes. The results show that the concept of abstract trees reduces the network reconfiguration complexity while still guaranteeing end-to-end QoS.

Personalization and group communications have always been conflicting approaches. From one side, the user wants to get the services with their specific characteristics. From the other side, group communications imply the support of the same service, with the same characteristics, by a group of users. To simultaneously enable personalization and profit from the resources improvements provided by group-based communications, these groups need to be defined based on the users requirements, services and network information, which we denote as “context”. Based on this context for group definition, it is possible to adapt the content to the groups of users or even re-group them according to common features. This paper addresses the network part of the problem: based on the context information, we define an intelligent network selection, both for the access and core, respectively to efficiently choose the attachment points and the multicast trees for groups of users. This selection approach will improve the efficiency of the architecture in delivering the multiparty services. The simulation results of the proposed approach show that performing a wise network selection based on context increases overall network efficiency while still providing a personalized multiparty content delivery.