The recent proliferation of smartphone-based mobile Internet services has created an extraordinary growth in data traffic over cellular networks. This growth has fostered interest in exploring alternatives to alleviate data congestion while delivering a positive user experience. It is known that a very small number of users and applications cause a big percentage of the traffic load. Hence, adopting smarter traffic management mechanisms is one of the considered alternatives. These mechanisms allow telecom operators to move selected IP data traffic, for instance, between the cellular infrastructure and the WLAN infrastructure, which is considered a key feature in the latest 3GPP and IETF specifications. This article presents and compares two possible approaches to IP flow mobility offloading that are currently being considered by the IETF. The first one is based on extending existing client-based IP mobility solutions to allow flow mobility where the user terminal is fully involved in the mobility process, and the second one is based on extending current network- based IP mobility solutions where the user terminal is not aware of the mobility.

An important requirement for Internet protocol (IP) networks to achieve the aim of ubiquitous connectivity is network mobility (NEMO). With NEMO support we can provide Internet access from mobile platforms, such as public transportation vehicles, to normal nodes that do not need to implement any special mobility protocol. The NEMO basic support protocol has been proposed in the IETF as a first solution to this problem, but this solution has severe performance limitations. This paper presents MIRON: Mobile IPv6 route optimization for NEMO, an approach to the problem of NEMO support that overcomes the limitations of the basic solution by combining two different modes of operation: a Proxy-MR and an address delegation with built-in routing mechanisms. This paper describes the design and rationale of the solution, with an experimental validation and performance evaluation based on an implementation

This article surveys the major existing approaches and proposes a novel architecture to support mobile networks in network-based, localized mobility domains. Our architecture enables conventional terminals without mobility support to obtain connectivity either from fixed locations or mobile platforms (e.g., vehicles) and move between them, while keeping their ongoing sessions. This functionality offers broadband Internet access in automotive scenarios such as public transportation systems, where users spend time both in vehicles and at stations. The key advantage of our proposal, as compared with current alternatives, is that the described mobile functionality is provided to conventional IP devices that lack mobility functionality. We also performed an experimental evaluation of our proposal that shows that our architecture improves the quality perceived by the end users.

There is a growing need for vehicular mobility datasets that can be employed in the simulative evaluation of protocols and architectures designed for upcoming vehicular networks. Such datasets should be realistic, publicly available, and heterogeneous, i.e., they should capture varied traffic conditions. In this paper, we contribute to the ongoing effort to define such mobility scenarios by introducing a novel set of traces for vehicular network simulation. Our traces are derived from high-resolution real-world traffic counts, and describe the road traffic on two highways around Madrid, Spain, at several hours of different working days. We provide a thorough discussion of the real-world data underlying our study, and of the synthetic trace generation process. Finally, we assess the potential impact of our dataset on networking studies, by characterizing the connectivity of vehicular networks built on the different traces. Our results underscore the dramatic impact that relatively small communication range variations have on the network. Also, they unveil previously unknown temporal dynamics of the topology of highway vehicular networks, and identify their causes.

This article analyzes the necessity and feasibility of designing a protocol for active networks that supports multicasting applications with different characteristics in terms of data loss tolerance. The article begins with a presentation of the service elements required by multicast applications, and from this study a network service description is given. The advantages of providing this service over active networks are studied. The service description is then used as the set of requirements for the design of RMANP (reliable multicast active network protocol), which is capable of providing the service over active network technology. Then a prototype implementation of RMANP over the active node transport system (ANTS) is presented, and some data for the evaluation of its performance is provided. Finally, the main conclusions are that active networks provide flexible support for the development of new network services, but further improvements in runtime efficiency are required