Mounir Kellil

IP mobile multicast: Challenges and solutions

This article outlines the challenges of IP multicast over Mobile IP. Then it provides a comprehensive overview of existing multicast solutions to handle mobile sources and receivers in both the Mobile IPv4 and the Mobile IPv6 environments. The solutions are classified into different classes in light of how the network infrastructure is used and the nature of the multicast members (receivers or sources). For each solution, we present a brief overview; we describe the architecture and the proposed protocol; we discuss the advantages and the limitations; and we compare qualitatively all the solutions of each class based on common criteria such as optimal routing, join latency, handover transparency, etc.

Multicast receiver and sender access control and its applicability to mobile IP environments: a survey

Ensuring secure access control to multicast delivery trees is a challenging issue that is still largely open. Moreover, the impact of host mobility on the access control to the delivery tree has not been investigated. In this article we address the receiver and sender access control problems to the delivery tree and extend the interest to the mobile IP environment by taking into account its particular issues and requirements. To achieve this, we review the existing approaches by classifying them into three classes: digital signature-based solutions, shared secret-based solutions, and hybrid solutions. We also investigate their efficiency and limitations with respect to the specified requirements both in stationary and mobile cases. Our study shows that four main problems arise among the existing approaches. First, few approaches addressed the sender access control problem. Second, both the digital signature- based solutions and hybrid solutions are vulnerable to DoS attacks. Third, the existing solutions do not provide an efficient user exclusion mechanism. Fourth, the defined access control mechanisms result in a number of problems in mobile IP environments.

Architecture for context-aware multiparty delivery in mobile heterogeneous networks

Future networks are envisioned to satisfy the user needs and improve their quality of experience. This requires the networks to support context-aware information, where context of the user, session, network and environment will greatly influence the way the session is delivered: new approaches are required to deal with the overall context information and network reaction to constantly context changes. This paper presents a context-aware architecture that provides delivery of multiparty services in heterogeneous and mobile environments. The architecture, its elements and functionalities are described through a specific application to a context-driven use case scenario. We show that this architecture is able to provide personalized and multiparty services to the users, addressing their characteristics and preferences, and optimizing network support while mobility and heterogeneous environments are in place.

Mobility-Aware Rendezvous Point for Mobile Multicast Sources

The Internet research community has done a great effort to support mobile receivers in multicast session, but less interest was given to the problem of mobile sources. In fact, building source-specific tree with mobile sources is challenging. Depending on the nature of the mobility of the multicast source, several problems emerge such as the handover transparency, the multicast service interruption, and the reconstruction of the multicast delivery tree after each handover. In this work, we develop a new solution to make multicast source mobility transparent. Our solution introduces a new entity called Mobility-aware Rendezvous Point (MRP) in order to handle the mobility of a multicast source in both intra-domain and inter-domain multicasting. Our solution uses a smooth handover technique between MRP peers and interoperates efficiently with existing multicast routing protocols.

Fast Restoration of Connectivity for Wireless Sensor Networks

Node failures represent a fundamental problem in wireless sensor networks. Such failures may result in partitioned networks and lose of sensed information. A network recovery approach is thus necessary in order to ensure continuous network operations. In this paper, we propose CoMN2 a scalable and distributed approach for network recovery from node failures in wireless sensor networks. CoMN2 relies on a new concept called network mapping which consists in partitioning the network into several regions of increasing criticality. The criticality is set according to the energy, the traffic distribution and the deployment of nodes. Using this network mapping, our solution CoMN2 ensures the continuous network activity by efficiently swapping nodes from low critical area to highly critical area when required.Simulation results prove the effectiveness of our approach and show that the obtained improvement in terms of lifetime is in the order of 40%.

Security and Routing Scoped IP Multicast Addresses

IP multicast is an efficient and scalable network layer delivering method for multimedia content to a large number of receivers across the Internet. It saves the network bandwidth and optimizes the processing overhead of the source. However, current IP multicast deployment is still facing many deployment complexities. In particular, the duality and the strong relationship between multicast addressing and routing along with the absence of an integrated multicast access control security mechanism have prevented a broader deployment of multicasting over large and public network infrastructures such as the Internet. To solve multicast scoping and autonomic multicast routing triggering issues, we propose a new scope based and hierarchical multicast control and routing protocol . Our approach introduces a new multicast addressing scheme that embeds simultaneously a plurality of hierarchical scopes and associates each scope with a specific access control and routing method. We evaluate the performance of our solution with respect to access control overhead and we analyse its strengths and limitations compared to related works.