Pehr Söderman

Enabling future internet research: the FEDERICA case

The Internet, undoubtedly, is the most influential technical invention of the 20th century that affects and constantly changes all aspects of our day-to-day lives nowadays. Although it is hard to predict its long-term consequences, the potential future of the Internet definitely relies on future Internet research. Prior to every development and deployment project, an extensive and comprehensive research study must be performed in order to design, model, analyze, and evaluate all impacts of the new initiative on the existing environment. Taking the ever-growing size of the Internet and the increasing complexity of novel Internet-based applications and services into account, the evaluation and validation of new ideas cannot be effectively carried out over local test beds and small experimental networks. The gap which exists between the small-scale pilots in academic and research test beds and the realsize validations and actual deployments in production networks can be bridged by using virtual infrastructures. FEDERICA is one of the facilities, based on virtualization capabilities in both network and computing resources, which creates custom-made virtual environments and makes them available for Future Internet Researchers. This article provides a comprehensive overview of the state-of-the-art research projects that have been using the virtual infrastructure slices of FEDERICA in order to validate their research concepts, even when they are disruptive to the test beds infrastructure, to obtain results in realistic network environments.

An SCTP-based Mobility Management Framework for Smartphones and Tablets

The current wireless network landscape comprises a plethora of technologies including WLAN, WiMAX and 3G, and not much speaks for a radical change of the state of affairs in the near future. In light of this, it becomes pivotal to facilitate vertical handover between different types of wireless networks. Although, a large number of vertical handover schemes have been proposed in the past several years, the majority of the proposed solutions reside in the network and/or link layer -- e.g., Mobile IP and various IEEE 802.21 schemes - and relatively few are transport-layer solutions. However, we think transport-layer solutions many times are attractive, particularly in cases where there are no economic incentives to upgrade the existing network infrastructure. To this end, we have designed a lightweight, transport-level mobility framework based on the Stream Control Transmission Protocol (SCTP) and its extension for dynamic address reconfiguration. The framework API has been kept very small and closely aligned with the SCTP sockets extensions, which makes porting of existing applications fairly straightforward. To demonstrate its usefulness for low-power tablets and smart phones, we have implemented our framework on a Motorola Xoom tablet running the Android OS. Our initial proof-of-concept experiment gave satisfactory results with a handover performance on par with that of other vertical handover solutions.

Mind the SmartGap : A Buffer Management Algorithm For Delay Tolerant Wireless Sensor Networks

Limited memory capacity is one of the major constraints in Delay Tolerant Wireless Sensor Networks. Efficient management of the memory is critical to the performance of the network. This paper proposes a novel buffer management algorithm, SmartGap, a Quality of Information (QoI) targeted buffer management algorithm. That is, in a wireless sensor network that continuously measures a parameter which changes over time, such as temperature, the value of a single packet is governed by an estimation of its contribution to the recreation of the original signal. Attractive features of SmartGap include a low computational complexity and a simplified reconstruction of the original signal. An analysis and simulations in which the performance of SmartGap is compared with the performance of several commonly used buffer management algorithms in wireless sensor networks are provided in the paper. The simulations suggest that SmartGap indeed provides significantly improved QoI compared the other evaluated algorithms.

Handover in the Wild: The feasibility of vertical handover in commodity smartphones

Today commodity mobile devices are frequently equipped with two wireless access technologies, WiFi and 3G/4G. To enable continuous connectivity it is vital that these terminals provide for vertical handover between different technologies. Particularly, they should provide a vertical handover that complies with the timeliness requirements of soft real-time applications. Considering aspects such as cost- and ease-of-deployment, application neutrality, and, not least, the emergence of transport protocols that support multi-homing such as mobile SCTP and multi-path TCP, we think it would be beneficial to handle vertical handover in the transport layer of the mobile terminal. This paper demonstrates through several real-world experiments, the feasibility of using a lightweight vertical handover scheme in smart mobile terminals for live video streaming. The vertical handover criteria is based on the received signal strength. Our experiments suggest that the scheme indeed provides for seamless vertical handover at walking speed - our target scenario. However, the experiments also suggest that the scheme gives significant reductions in handover time, as compared to mobile SCTP without improvements, at higher speeds.

Sub-second transport layer vertical handover using mSCTP in android mobile devices

Contemporary mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets are increasingly equipped with multiple network interfaces that enable automatic vertical handover between heterogeneous wireless networks including WiFi and cellular 3G and 4G networks. However, the employed vertical handover schemes are mostly quite simple, and incur non-negligible service disruptions to ongoing sessions, e.g., video streaming and live conferencing sessions. A number of improved mobility management frameworks for these lightweight mobile devices have been proposed in the past recent years. Although these may result in negligible service disruptions, the vast majority of them are network- or integrated network- and link-layer based, and require support in the infrastructure to be successfully deployed. This paper demonstrates the feasibility of using an infrastructure-independent, transport-level vertical handover scheme on a smartphone for an application as demanding as video streaming. In our study, we used a previously developed Android-based mobility framework. The study shows that a standardized mobility solution based on the Stream Control Transmission Protocol (SCTP) and its extension for Dynamic Address Reconfiguration (DAR), incurs a service disruption on par with comparable proposed network- and link-layer solutions.