Gateway Discovery and Selection in Mobile Hotspots.pdfVIP

Gateway Discovery and Selection in Mobile Hotspots A. Iera, A. Molinaro, S. Polito, G. Ruggeri, and A. Vilasi Universitá “Mediterranea” di Reggio Calabria- D.I.M.E.T. Via Graziella, Localitá Feo di Vito, 89060 Reggio Calabria Italy. E-mail (iera, antonella.molinaro, polito, ruggeri, vilasi)@ing.unirc.it Abstract Gaining IP connectivity in mobile hotspots (e.g. public transport vehicles) through on-board local area networks and mobile gateways has recently attracted strong commer- cial and research interests. In this paper we propose a multi-dimensional protocol to support the process of gate- way discovery in mobile hotspots, and to help in selecting the best path able to satisfy the user’s requirements and to guarantee a target end-to-end service quality. Our proposal is based on highly popular and almost standard protocols, such as SDPng for session description and AODV for route discovery. 1 Introduction A mobile hotspot can be seen as an entire network, mov- ing as a unit, and gaining connectivity to the Internet via one or more gateways. To gain network connectivity in mo- bile hotspots, such as public transport vehicles, through on- board local area networks and mobile gateways is becoming an increasingly popular area of research and development [1, 2]. Passengers in mobile hotspots are usually connected to an high-speed on-board local area network, which is in turn connected to the Internet via multiple wireless access tech- nologies (e.g., GPRS, UMTS, 802.11, etc.) through a mul- tiplicity of wireless service providers. This multi-homing technique has been already proposed in many architectures [3, 4] as a means to increase the aggregate bandwidth for the on-board network; to increase resilience to network dis- ruptions; and to provide a wide range of Internet services to the passengers [5]. Given the advantages of multi-homing in mobile hotspots, a critical challenge is to decide on how to distribute the pas- sengers’ data traffic among the available networ