Master thesis information

Title:"Reconfigurable Application Networks trhough Peer Discovery and Handovers" 

Thesis Location

This thesis is conducted for the Institute for Microelectronics and Information Technology (IMIT) at the Royal Institute of Technology (KTH) in Stockholm (Sweden) and for the Department of Telecommunications at Politecnico di Torino in Turin (Italy).

Thesis Abstract

This thesis addresses an area with significant potential for offering services to mobile users. In such a scenario users should have minimal interaction with applications which, by taking into account available context information, should be able to make decisions, such as setting up delivery paths between peers without requiring a third party for the negotiation.

In wireless reconfigurable networks, the mobile users are on the move and must deal with dynamic changes of network resources. In such a network, mobile users should be able to contact other peers or resources by using the current route. Thus although manual configuration of the network is a possible solution, it is not easily used because of the dynamic properties of the system which would demand too much user interaction. However, existing discovery protocols fall short of accomodating the complexity of reconfigurable and heterogeneous networks.

The primary objective of this thesis work was to investigate a new approach at the application level for signaling by taking advantage of SIP's features. The Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) is used to provide naming and localization of the user, and to provide functionality to invite users to establish sessions and to agree on communication parameters. The Specific Event Notification of the SIP protocol provides a framework for the notification of specific events and I believed that it could be instantiated as solution to the problem for reconfigurable application networks.

This thesis proposes a method for providing localization information to SIP User Agents in order to establish sessions for service discovery. Furthermore, this method should consider context meta-data to design strategies effective in heterogeneous networks.

A viable solution must support (re)location of users at the application layer when they roam between different wireless networks, such as GPRS and WLAN. An analysis of the implications of the proposed model is presented; in this analysis emphasis has been placed on how this model interacts with existing services.

Keywords: SPDP, SIP, reconfigurable networks, service discovery, context information, WLAN, GPRS