Recent Advances on Future Networks and Their Management
Ramn Agero
1
Bernd-Ludwig Wenning
1
Andreas Timm-Giel
1
Dirk Pesch
1
0
) University of Cantabria
,
Av los Castros s/n, 39005 Santander, Cantabria
,
Spain
1
A. Timm-Giel Hamburg University of Technology
,
Schwarzenbergstrae 95, 21073 Hamburg
,
Germany
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The rapid growth in mobile traffic and broadband wireless
connections, together with the advent of the
Internet-ofThings call for novel mobile and wireless network
management techniques, able to cope with an increasing number of
challenges. Individual techniques can no longer be considered
in isolation, but there must be a clear cooperation and cross
fertilization amongst them. Since 2009, the International
Conference on Mobile Networks and Management (MONAMI)
provides researchers with the opportunity to describe and
discuss their latest research results. The Call-for-Papers of this
Special Issue was a result of the 5th edition of the MONAMI
conference, which was held in Cork, in September 2013.
The six papers that were finally selected for publication,
after a thorough review process in which each paper was
reviewed by at least three experts, provide a good picture of
the currently most relevant topics within the field of mobile
and wireless networking. They give an interesting perspective
on some of the most challenging problems and discuss
interesting techniques and solutions to address them.
From the point of view of the wireless substratum, one of
the topics that has received much attention recently is the
cognitive radio paradigm. In order to be able to support the
increasing resource demand, a more efficient usage of the
available spectrum is necessary. In the first paper of this
special issue, Sunita S. Barve proposes an opportunistic
routing and channel assignment scheme for mobile ad-hoc
networks. The proposed holistic approach is based on
multiagent reinforcement learning (MARL) techniques and aims at
exploiting unused chunks of licensed spectrum bands. The
author combines a number of different metrics to take
decisions and by means of simulations, he shows that the
MARLbased routing scheme outperforms other state-of-the-art
solutions. He also analyses different techniques to carry out relay
selection.
Another key aspect of the management of future wireless
networks is their mobility. Traditional schemes might not be
sufficient to cope with stringent new requirements and
therefore, novel solutions must be fostered. The next two papers of
this special issue specifically deal with advanced mobility
solutions. First, Wen-Kang Jia, after providing an interesting
survey of existing MobileIP based mobility protocols,
proposes a universal IP mobility framework that is able to select
the most suitable mobility protocol, for scenarios in which
Mobile IPv6 and Proxy Mobile IPv6 coexist. The author also
proposes Traffic Driven Pseudo Binding Update (TDPBU), a
novel route optimization scheme, and assesses its performance
by means of extensive simulation studies. Afterwards, Li Jun
Zhang et al. propose Seamless Mobile IPv6 (SMIPv6), a novel
mobility protocol that exploits the multi-homing capabilities
of most of current wireless devices to establish bidirectional
secure tunnels that are established before handoffs. The
authors use the OPNET simulator to compare the performance of
this protocol with traditional MIPv6. The results show that
SMIPv6 outperforms the state of the art both in terms of
handoff latency and packet losses.
Another angle that is also covered in this special issue is a
new set of services and applications that have emerged from
the possibilities of new wireless technologies. In particular,
Michael Charitos and Grigorios Kalivas present, in the fourth
paper of this special issue, a surveillance system by means of a
vehicular WiMAX - WiFi Network. They present a highly
modular architecture, able to cover a wide range of scenarios.
One clear contribution of this paper is that the authors use a
real hybrid-network prototype to assess the performance of
their architecture over an in-tunnel scenario. The results
demonstrate that, in terms of the downlink throughput, the system
is feasible and can effectively cope with its requirements.
An important aspect that needs to be addressed in
forthcoming wireless network scenarios is the convergence with
fixed networks. Although the capacity of wireless
technologies is continuously increasing, they will never reach the
capacity of their wired counterparts. In fact, mobile operators
are currently fostering offloading techniques and, in many
cases, the smaller access alternatives rely on a fixed
broadband connection. In addition, the trend is to offer each home
with a fiber connection. In order to appropriately manage this
broadband connectivity, Giacomo Bernardi et al. propose in
the fifth paper of this special issue BSense, a flexible
broadband mapping system to assess the coverage and the quality of
the available connections in a given geographic region. The
proposed management scheme obtains (...truncated)