Architecture and mechanisms to support mobility in the future internet

Iapichino, Giuliana

Thesis

The evolution of Internet and its hosts does not match anymore the current Internet architecture, designed when mobility, multihoming and security were not considered, and based on Internet Protocol (IP) addresses with the double role of host's identity and host's topological location. A novel mobility architecture for future Internet is proposed in this thesis based on Host Identity Protocol (HIP) and Proxy Mobile IPv6 (PMIPv6), and mainly on the two principle ideas behind them. The first idea is the concept of host identity layer located between network and transport layer. It provides unique cryptographic identifiers for hosts, called host identifiers, which are independent of host's current location and network address. The second idea is to create a locator which defines the topological location of a host in a way that is routable in the Internet, but has a specific scheme for routing in the local domain to which the host is attached. From these two basic ideas we have defined a unique architecture where each host has an identifier which uniquely identify the host and which is created as the public key of a public/private key pair, bringing built-in security support and one or several locators, depending on the fact of having multiple interfaces and being multihomed; locators are used for routing, but they have different topological semantics depending on the network considered, allowing inherent location privacy. The result is an architecture which not only has the advantages of HIP and PMIPv6 protocols, such as on one side security, global mobility, multihoming and on the other side local mobility and location privacy, but it includes efficient and dynamic mobility and multihoming scheme at local and global level, ad-hoc networking, traffic engineering and addressing scheme.

The work described in this thesis includes also a practical approach to the two main protocols of the architecture. In particular, PMIPv6 has been completely developed on a real test-bed with all the machines running Ubuntu 7.10 with 2.6.22-15-generic Linux kernel and reusing Mobile IPv6 for Linux (MIPL) v.2.0.2. The aim of the implementation has been not only to use it for the architecture, but also to provide to mobile network operators a clear implementation analysis which takes into account all the important recommendations for respecting the standard RFC 5213 and, at the same time, for reducing handover delays. The implementation is fully compliant with the standard and with the directives provided in the standard. For the first time, PMIPv6's implementation issues such as layer 2 attachment and detachment, unicast Router Advertisement messages, default router detection and tunneling have been considered to evaluate their impact on protocol's performances. As regards HIP protocol implementation, the open source Host Identity Protocol for Linux (HIPL) v.1.0.4-48 developed for InfraHIP project by several universities and research groups in Finland has been used. It runs on user-space on Linux kernel, exactly as our PMIPv6 implementation. The two protocol have been combined to test and to prove through experimental results the feasibility of the proposed system architecture.

Finally, this thesis applies the proposed architecture to Public Safety Applications. The problem of supporting mobility at the disaster site to rescue teams equipped with different heterogeneous access technologies and providing interoperability between different agencies and jurisdictions is still under investigation by research communities worldwide. A satellite and wireless mesh network architecture is proposed for emergency mobile communications in which HIP and PMIPv6 represent a secure global and localized mobility solution for the heterogeneous ad hoc mesh network deployed at the disaster site and communicating with the headquarters via satellite. This solution provides also an efficient mechanism of intra and inter-technology handover for Public Safety users equipped with heterogeneous devices at the disaster field and secure end-to-end connections for communications at the disaster area and with the headquarters.

Detail

Document

BIBTEX

Type:

Thesis

Date:

2010-07-12

Department:

Communication systems

Eurecom Ref:

3172