Mobility Management and Communication Support for Nomadic Applications

There is an increasing demand for realizing communication services for nomadic environments, capable to provide applications with mobility management facilities and application-aware adaptation support. This paper proposes a novel mobility management and communication architecture specifically suited for nomadic environments, offering communication facilities and adaptation support by means of an API, named NCSOCKS. The driving idea is to provide application and middleware developers of nomadic services with essential mobility-enabled communication support, while hiding network heterogeneity in terms of wireless technology and leveraging the availability level of communication in spite of transient signal degradations. Transient signal degradations, due to device movements and/or shadowing, have the effect of increasing the handoff frequency. The proposed architecture integrates a novel mechanism to improve the connection availability by reducing the number of unnecessary handover procedures. In order to evaluate the proposal, an approach based on combined use of simulation and prototype-based measurements is adopted. 1 Rationale and Contributions Recent years have been characterized by an explosive growth in the deployment of wireless data communication technologies. The IEEE 802.11 family [1], Bluetooth [2], and the infrared wireless technologies [3] are nowadays widely deployed, and backed by a growing number of hardware and software vendors. This scenario has led to the definition of a new computing paradigm, the Nomadic Computing. Nomadic Computing (NC) is a form of mobile computing where communication takes place over strongly heterogeneous network infrastructure, composed of several wireless domains or cells, which are glued together by a permanent network infrastructure (the core network), aiming to provide anytime, anywhere