In the current mobile network architecture, network traffic between user equipment (UE) and services deployed on the public cloud is tromboned towards the anchor point which could lead to network congestion. Deploying services closer to the UE, for example near the eNodeB, is a potential solution. The services are deployed on small scale data centers connected to, or collocated with the eNodeB, called 'eNodeB-Cloud' (eNBC). Mobility of UEs presents a challenge for deploying services in an eNBC. When the UE is handed over from one eNodeB to another, seamless migration of UE context between the service instances running in different eNBCs needs to be ensured. In this paper, we propose a Platform as a Service framework to enable UE context migration between eNBCs. The architecture consists of handover signaling mechanism, TCP session migration technology, context transfer protocol and a set of APIs towards the service. An evaluation of the prototype implementation shows that on an average the time taken to migrate a UE context between two eNBCs is in the order of 12 ms, which is within the limit of handover interruption time between two eNodeBs.

Many smartphone applications or services require position information, e.g., location based services including mobile advertisement, mobile social network, etc. In this paper, we propose a prediction based mobile positioning mechanism which utilizes history mobility information in a smartphone. The proposed solution is implemented in an Android phone and has been evaluated in real-life for a period of three months. During the evaluation period the proposed mechanism has reduced energy consumption for positioning with 60% compared to GPS positioning. The accuracy is increased by around 76% compared to network based positioning only. Thus it provides significant benefit for those location-based services which needs longer time usage but less accuracy than GPS positioning.

The mobile plane architecture (MPA) is a network architecture that provides micro-mobility in a network-centric way, that is, the burden of supporting micro-mobility is placed on the network and not on the mobile nodes. MPA employs an overlay network above an IPv4 or IPv6 transport network in order to direct traffic to the mobile nodes. The overlay network is built by establishing point-to-multipoint (P2MP) tunnels through the transport network. This paper presents an implementation of MPA over MPLS/GMPLS networks. It is shown that the combination of P2MP tunneling with label stacking is an effective way for providing mobility services in MPLS/GMPLS transport networks. Results obtained in a lab-sized network are presented as well.

Micromobility protocols aim to improve localized mobility by reducing the handover overhead. The Mobility Plane Architecture (MPA) was designed to support micromobility in standard IP or MPLS/GMPLS networks in a network-centric way, that is, the burden demanded by micromobility is placed on the network, not on the mobile nodes. The aim of this paper is to present the reactive and proactive handover procedures supported by MPA, its modeling and performance evaluation. Results show that the proactive handover loses much less packets than reactive handover, being more suited for multimedia traffic.

This paper presents the design and implementation of the mobility plane architecture (MPA). MPA is a network architecture that provides micro-mobility in a network-centric way, that is, the burden of supporting micro-mobility is placed on the network and not on the mobile nodes. The implementation employs RSVP-TE to establish IP/IP and MPLS point-to-multipoint tunnels in order to direct traffic to the mobile nodes. DHCP is used for tracking the mobile node locations and RSVP-TE opaque data carries the location information to install routes to them. Results obtained in a lab-sized network and some quantitative comparisons between MPA and other related work are presented as well.

This paper presents an architecture for supporting micro-mobility in IP networks. The architecture is presented in terms of its functional blocks and interaction protocols. The architecture, named mobility plane architecture (MPA), offers a network-centric solution for micro-mobility. This means that all the functions necessary for supporting Layer-3 mobility are placed on the network, not on the mobile node. The architecture does not interfere with services already deployed in the transport network, even services supporting macro mobility such as Mobile IP. Another key point is the total independence of the architecture from IPv6, meaning that it can be deployed on existing IPv4 networks.

Micro-mobility protocols aim to improve localized mobility by reducing the handover overhead. The mobility plane architecture (MPA) was designed to support micro-mobility in standard IP or MPLS/GMPLS networks in a network-centric way: that is, the burden demanded by micro-mobility is placed on the network, not on the mobile nodes. The aim of this paper is to present some insights on performance evaluation for micro-mobility architectures, using the MPA network implementation as a testbed. Experimental results show it is necessary to consider the type of mobile node when evaluating a micro-mobility scenario. Hardware and software aspects may affect the nodepsilas interaction with the micro-mobility protocols / architectures. The results show the importance of considering (not neglecting) L2 and L3 association times because they can affect all procedures involving new associations (such as registration and handover). Proposed models for evaluating mobile architectures consider as irrelevant the times for L2 attachment to a new base station and acquisition of a new IP address for the mobile node, which results in an overestimate of the performance for the mobile architecture.

Ethernet is becoming increasingly popular in metro and carrier-grade networks because of its cost-effectiveness, simplicity and scalability. Nevertheless, Ethernet was originally designed as a LAN technology, therefore, it lacks some features, such as fast fault-protection and sophisticated management, which are very important in the new carrier-grade application areas. We propose a simple failure protection mechanism for Ethernet networks that can recover from node and link failures under 50 milliseconds, which is also provided by SDH/Sonet rings. The mechanism relies on a lightweight distributed protocol that runs on IP routers at the edges of the network and works with commodity off-the-shelf Ethernet switches. This paper describes the protocol design and implementation as well as the network testbed implementation for assessing the performance and the robustness of the mechanism. The results collected in the testbed are shown and discussed in the paper.

Reservation-based quality of service (QoS) in a mixed wireless and wireline environment requires an end-to-end signaling protocol that is capable of adapting to the idiosyncrasies of the different networks. The QoS NSIS signaling protocol (QoS-NSLP) has been created by the Next Steps In Signaling working group at the IETF to fulfill this need for an adaptive reservation protocol. It allows reservation requests to be interpreted by equipment implementing different QoS models along the path between a data sender and a data receiver. This paper describes the QoS-NSLP, and an example of a particular QoS model that is based on resource management in DiffServ (RMD). RMD provides a scalable dynamic resource management method for DiffServ networks. RMD has two basic functions to control the traffic load in a DiffServ domain: it provides admission control for flows entering the network and it has an algorithm that terminates the required amount of flows in case of congestion caused by failures (e.g. link or router) within a DiffServ domain. The admission control within the domain can be either measurement - or reservation-based. The basic signaling mechanism is described for different signaling scenarios and the expected performance of the protocol is discussed.

A motion segmentation algorithm is introduced. The algorithm is based on the assumption of one coherent moving area (without holes) on a static background. It does coarse-to-fine pyramid-based boundary refinement that attempts to classify the blocks into three classes: inside, border, and outside.>