Mobile Networking ❯ RAMON: A Rapid Mobility Emulation Tool for Mobile Networks and Systems

Overview

Mobile networks rely on registration-based protocols to maintain connectivity, allow roaming, and assure that mobility doesn't become an impediment in the communication process. Emerging Mobile Networks such as Mobile-IP and others mobile networking protocols offer seamless mobility for mobile and nomadic users. Unfortunately, this is limited to slow moving elements. In order to improve the problems related to handoff, registration, paging and hosts moving at higher speeds, current research leads to provide "micro-mobility" protocols suitable to cluster or encapsulate areas to specific mobility conditions where registration and handoff are optimized in certain conditions. Protocols such as Cellular-IP, Hierarchical mobile-IP, and Hawaii are aimed towards this philosophy, and to some extent, provide a good solution for micro-mobility environments.

RAMON

Our research aims at examining the adequacy of current mobile network protocols as well as examining micro-mobility modes under rapid mobility or hosts moving at high speeds. Additionally we will focus on similar scenarios but at the pico-cell level or piconets presented in Bluetooth. In other words, rapid mobility could be found in confined places (e.g., Bluetooth connected robot arms moving at high speed in a manufacturing plant), as well as in roads, tracks and high way (e.g., Wireless LAN covered railroad track of a commuter train), or even in open space. We take an experimental approach to studying the effect of speed (rapid mobility) on the performance of mobile networks. We have designed and implemented by a test-bed called RAMON that combines simulation and emulation approaches in order to adequately capture the effects of rapid mobility. We are currently working on a predictive/adaptive routing algorithm that can be used to enable Mobile IP to function satisfactorily under rapid mobility conditions.

People

Dr. Sumi Helal
Jun Tian
Edwin Hernandez
Madhav Chinta

Publications

• J. Tian and A. Helal, "Speed Adaptive MIP over Wireless LAN," submitted to the IEEE Consumer Communications and Networking Conference, to be held in Las Vegas, NV, January 2006. (pdf)

• J. Tian, A. Helal, "Rapid Mobility of MIP over WLAN," International Conference on Computer Networks and Mobile Computing (ICCNMC'05), Zhangjiajie, China, Aug 2-4, 2005. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Springer-Verlag GmbH, ISSN: 0302-9743, ISBN: 3-540-28102-9, Volume 3619/2005. (pdf)

• E. Hernandez and A. Helal, "Predictive Mobile IP for Rapid Mobility"," Proceedings of the fourth IEEE Workshop on Wireless Local Networks (WLN), November 2004, Tampa, Florida. (pdf)

• E. Hernandez and Sumi Helal, "RAMON: Rapid Mobility Network Emulator," Proceedings of the 27th Annual IEEE Conference on Local Computer Networks (LCN), November 2002, Tampa, Florida (pdf).

• E. Hernandez and Sumi Helal, "Examining Mobile-IP Performance in Rapidly Mobile Environments: The Case of a Commuter Train," Proceedings of the 26th Annual IEEE Conference on Local Computer Networks (LCN), November 2001, Tampa, Florida (pdf).