Tony Jokikyyny

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.

Ambient Networks - A Framework for Multi-Access Control in Heterogeneous Networks

In the ambient networks project research is ongoing in order to define a new control space for future internetworking. This internetworking will be characterized by a high degree of network heterogeneity as well as nomadicity and mobility of both users as well as networks. The so called ambient control space (ACS), provides functionality to support how to manage these traits of future internetworking. This paper provides a short presentation on the architecture of ambient networks and the ACS, and then focus on how connectivity is handled from a multi-access and mobility perspective through the support of the ACS.

Using the Internet to communicate software metrics in a large organization

Many companies face serious problems in implementing their software process improvement (SPI) programs. Often, the problems are related to human factors such as lack of knowledge, communication, or motivation. Not providing suitable tools can also hinder implementation as SPI activities often include some overhead to the normal job. Good tools can help lower the adoption barrier by minimizing the cost of, for example, metrics data collection and by providing immediate feedback to the practitioners. This paper discusses how Ericsson in Finland used a WWW-based tool to improve its software inspection process and how, based on those experiences, it is further developing software process support based on Internet technology.

The diverse stakeholder roles to involve in standardization of emerging and future self-managing networks

This paper discusses some of the key points related to Standardization that need to be noted and discussed in the wide ICT community, to help understand the implication and impact of emerging and future network technologies on the various stakeholders of the global ICT ecosystems. The implication of emerging and future network technologies is that it is now the time to involve every key stakeholder in shaping, reviewing and contributing to the evolution of standards as well as the processes involved in making standards. The success to attaining quality and stability of emerging and future standards hinges on the engagements of the various key stakeholders and roles discussed in this paper. This paper is aimed at helping various stakeholders identify where they fit in the changing landscape of standardization, and promoting further discussions and debates along the topic, since the necessary discussions are not taking place at the pace expected by the global ICT community. We look at the key aspects requiring continued discussions and consideration so as to help accelerate standards development processes and adoption of standards, to help facilitate innovation and new technologies that dramatically bring about changes to the global economy and improve the lives of citizens across the globe. Therefore, it is very important to understand that Future Network Research directions must be aligned with newly launched activities in standardization of emerging and future network technologies.

Autonomicity in Virtual Private Network provisioning for enterprises

Large enterprises usually require Virtual Private Network (VPN) services provisioned by the network operator. Also, there is an emerging need for supporting multicast communications, i.e. one host communicate with other hosts located in multiple remote sites. While MPLS-based IP VPNs are proven to be scalable, current approaches for extending it with multicast features involve potential state explosion, some bandwidth inefficiencies in the operator network or complex management tasks to find a good balance between forwarding state and bandwidth usage. These properties are direct consequences of the current MPLS and network-layer multicast forwarding approaches, as state should be maintained in the forwarding plane for each tree in each intermediate node. In this paper, we build on a stateless Bloom-filter-based forwarding plane installed in the service providers network. By moving the state into the packet headers from the nodes, new trade-offs appear due to the probabilistic nature of Bloom filters. We highlight autonomic scenarios, such as self-configuration of addresses, resource management in the network, simple autonomic provisioning of dynamic multicast trees and self-optimization of forwarding performance.