Motivation for Context Aware Mobility

69th IETF Chicago – MobOpts WGEranga Perera (NICTA), Blume O. (Alcatel-Lucent),

Georgiades M. (Uni of Surrey), Hepworth E. (Siemens), Jochen E., (NSN)

Context Aware Mobility

Use of “context” information pertaining to a mobility scenario for mobility management decision making

The problem statement: What exactly is “context”? What are the architectural implications of using “context” in mobility management decision making

Main motivation for this work

• Hype about context

(IETF experimental standards CXTP, CARD, IEEE 802.21, L2 abstractions for L3 handovers)

• However no coherent manner or relevant WG looking into this work specifically from the perspective of mobility protocols/architectures

Thus seeking to create enough interest in this area to make it more focused/goal oriented

Motivations for Context aware mobility

• Use of context for mobility management decisions enhances the performance

• Load sharing

• Enables functionalities according to a user’s expectation …….

What is Context?

Definition of context for mobility management purposes

Context: (as defined in RFC 3753) The information on the current state of a routing

related service required to re-establish the routing-related service on a new subnet without having to perform the entire protocol exchange with the MN from scratch

“Context” a much wider scope?

• Technology is sophisticated enough to obtain much more information pertaining to a mobility scenario

• Does routing related state take into consideration all aspects of context pertaining to a next generation mobility scenario

• If not what is “context”, do we need to redefine this term

Context for mobility management purposes

• Service context (what type of services are being used, i.e. what bandwidth and delay requirements exist)

• Security context (keys and authentication)

• Device context (capabilities of the MN)

• Mobility context (speed, HO rate, available candidate access networks)

• Flow control context (status of IP packets in the queues, e.g. for forwarding or for detection of transmission bottlenecks)

Possible areas (1/5)

• Should mobility management protocols incorporate context aware decision making?

• If mobility management protocols does context aware decision making would it solve issues such as race conditions?

Possible areas (2/5)

• Should the architecture be such that a standard is available to cater to choose between different mobility protocols according to the context?

• Should such an architecture take into consideration only Mobile IP variants (MIPv4, MIPv6, FMIPv6, HMIPv6, PMIPv6, DS-MIPv6 ) or different protocols such as HIP, SIP for context aware mobility management?

Possible areas (3/5)

• Verify the impact of certain context cues on mobility management decisions (For example if there is access to information such as network load what would be the performance gain of having such context information)

Possible areas (4/5)

• Is a cross layer mobility management protocol which takes into consideration state changes at each layer in performing handovers a more viable option?

Possible areas (5/5)

• Should a context aware mobility management architecture allow for arbitrary new sensor and information types to be introduced into the system at run-time?

Conclusion

• The discussed use case scenarios etc. point towards HO initiation/preparation separate from HO execution

• To make use of context then the way to go would be to support coexistence of mobility management protocols that could be triggered according to the mobility context