Tero Kauppinen

Dynamic network interface selection in multihomed mobile hosts

Current mobile devices are often equipped with several network interfaces, which may be of different access technologies, both wireless and cellular. Different requirements of different applications can result in a different preference of the interface that should be used. Network connections should be placed in the best possible interface based on these requirements. During communication, changes in the availability or characteristics of an access network behind an interface may result in a situation where already established connections should to be moved from one interface to another. For this purpose, a variety of mobility management protocols supporting handoffs between interfaces have been proposed. Some of these protocols move all traffic from one interface to another at once, while some protocols allow simultaneous communication over different interfaces. However, the current solutions do not propose any means for the user or application to be able to dynamically influence the interface selection during the operation of a mobile device. In this paper, we present an interface selection mechanism for multihomed mobile hosts. The mechanism allows for dynamic decision-making during the operation of a mobile device. In our solution, the local routing is controlled by user-defined rules defining which interface to be used for a certain traffic flow. The actual decision is based on the adaptation of these rules into availability and characteristics of the interfaces and access networks at any given time.

Handover performance with HIP and MIPv6

Mobility management in the current Internet is designed to work with mobile IPv4 and, when IPv6 is available, with mobile IPv6. These solutions are based on the current architecture in the Internet, where the IP address represents both the locator and the identifier of the node. In the IETF, identity and location information separation has raised a lot of discussion and new ideas have emerged to separate these. Host identity protocol is one candidate that can be used for this separation. It introduces also a new way of handling mobility management taking advantage on the mentioned identity and location separation.

Towards an innovation oriented IP multimedia subsystem [IP Multimedia Systems (IMS) Infrastructure and Services]

This article proposes an approach to IMS policy control based on session policies that achieve transparent end-to-end session establishments between IMS terminals. The article identifies drawbacks in the current IMS policy control methodology, discusses how these drawbacks may negatively influence the potential of IMS to provide innovative services, and describes how the new approach overcomes these drawbacks. Our proposal offers modularity and scalability properties that enable operators to establish policies and modify existing ones without major changes in the IMS core. Thus, policies can be applied transparently to SIP dialogs between terminals and modified on the fly without tearing down ongoing dialogs. The article also discusses a test bed implementation that worked as a proof-of-concept

Capillary networks - bridging the cellular and IoT worlds

The Internet of Things (IoT) represents a new revolutionary era of computing technology that enables a wide variety of devices to interoperate through the existing Internet infrastructure. The potential of this era is boundless, bringing in new communication opportunities in which ubiquitous devices blend seamlessly with the environment and embrace every aspect of our lives. Capillary networks will be a fundamental part of the IoT development, enabling local wireless sensor networks to connect to and efficiently use the capabilities of cellular networks through gateways. As a result, a vast range of constrained devices equipped with only short-range radio can utilize the cellular network capabilities to gain global connectivity, supported with the security, management and virtualization services of the cellular network. This paper introduces a new Capillary Network Platform and describes the rich set of functionalities that this platform enables. To show their practical value, the functionalities are applied to a set of typical scenarios. The aim of this paper is to give the reader insight about the Capillary Network Platform and illustrate how this work can be used to enhance the existing IoT networks and tackle their problems.

Energy Consumption Analysis of Edge Orchestrated Virtualized Wireless Multimedia Sensor Networks

Virtualization enabled by container-based technologies is a recently emerging concept in the integration of Internet of Things (IoT) and cloud computing. Due of their lightweight nature, container-based virtualization tools improve manageability of cloud-based IoT solutions by making it possible to update application software on the fly. Although different studies have demonstrated the feasibility of efficiently running container-based virtualization on low-power IoT nodes, the implication of doing so on battery-powered nodes has been overlooked. In this paper, we investigate how much energy overhead is generated by Docker-based virtualization on battery powered camera sensor nodes. In our scenario, camera nodes are most of the time in “power off” state to save energy. They are switched on for streaming video only when activity is detected by motion sensor nodes. By means of empirical measurement and subsequent analysis, we found that starting and closing of containers in the Docker platform adds-up roughly 13 percent power consumption overhead during the boot-up and shutdown of the camera nodes. Furthermore, the fixed overhead occurring from boot-up and shutdown procedures become negligible with longer video stream sessions.

Energy Efficiency in Wireless Multimedia Sensor Networking: Architecture, Management and Security

Wireless multimedia sensor network (WMSN) is a recently emerged concept of interconnected devices that are able to capture and deliver multimedia content. In contrast to traditional wireless sensor networks (WSN), the provided content may include video and audio streams and still images in addition to traditional scalar data such as temperature, humidity or light intensity. One of the core requirements for WSNs is energy efficiency: for maintenance reasons, the battery life must be long enough to provide feasible maintenance interval, rather months or years than days or weeks. The requirement is elaborated in WMSNs where video and audio capturing nodes inherently consume more energy than traditional scalar sensor nodes while the battery life requirements remain high. However, current technology base of video and audio surveillance does not enable sufficient energy-saving features to support ultra-low-energy multimedia sensor networking. In this chapter, we present a set of optimization methods to make WMSNs more energy efficient. The methods include energy-efficient hardware architectures combined with energy-optimized network topology management, lightweight virtualization and lightweight security solutions. The optimization methods are evaluated using real-life prototype implementations. The results provide an insight into effective methods for implementing energy-efficient WMSN.

Power consumption in remote gaming: An empirical evaluation

The thin-client approach for gaming is becoming more popular. For instance, Nvidia Shield, Valve Steam and Shinra technologies have offerings based on the concept. In remote cloud gaming, the game is being executed and processed in the cloud while the user receives a video and audio stream of the game, in a very similar way as with remote desktop clients. At the same time, clouds are moving towards the end-users as “edge clouds” with different standardization bodies, such Open Mobile Edge Cloud and Open Fog Consortium, giving momentum for the efforts. Were remote gaming approaches to utilize edge clouds, the games could be played without installing any infrastructure at the homes of end-users while keeping network delays to the latency-sensitive games low. While waiting for such edge-cloud deployments to substantiate, even regional clouds could be utilized for the purpose. In such environments, remote cloud gaming can already now be utilized by game companies as an alternative to traditional download-and-install games in order to support, e.g., anti-piracy protection. While the incentives for the game companies are relatively clear, the end-user experience has been investigated mainly from the viewpoint of latency. In this paper, we fill a research gap related to energy efficiency by showing that mobile phone users can save between 12 and 32 % power by utilizing remote gaming instead of playing with a native app. Our prototype is based on GamingAnywhere open-source software for which we have also integrated a gamepad for easier controls. We show power measurements both with a 2D and 3D games, and also additional measurements with a smart TV-stick.