still work in progress..

SONAR: A Statistic Repository of Mobile Platforms

Introduction

background

Many new wireless access technologies are emerging on the market, and some like Wireless LAN or Bluetooth are widely deployed in our daily life. Nowadays, people can connect to the Internet where they want, when they want. Nodes are also used during movement. For this reason, the need for IP Mobility is significantly increasing and IP Mobility protocols such as Mobile IP and NEMO were standardized at the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). It is expected that e.g. the fourth-generation (4G) cellular networks or the Intelligent Transport Systems (ITS) will be built upon all-IP based technologies, where different access networks are seamlessly integrated and host or network mobility needs to be supported.

While IP Mobility is being deployed, we are lacking benchmark tools to monitor mobility protocols. Most of the researchers have collected data necessary to design a mobility protocol through computer simulation. It is therefore unclear, at this time, whether the mobility protocols work as expected in the actual environment, and whether protocol configuration parameters (e.g. lifetimes of signaling messages, or re-transmit timers) are suitable for the real-life user. Thus, it becomes important to develop a monitoring system for mobility platforms. The monitoring system is used not only to evaluate mobility protocols, but also to know the behavior of network access technologies, physical movement of mobile nodes, or whatever may have impact on designing mobility protocols. For example, in the case of the NEMO Basic Support protocol, there is no route optimization mechanism standardized yet. Thus, large-scale early deployments are likely to face issues when the load increases. This is one of the information that can be obtained using this system. Additionally, it is also worth improving the accuracy of simulation models by using parameters obtained from this system, which enables us to simulate actual behaviors of network access technologies and mobility protocols.

This is an on-going effort within the Nautilus Project to provide a set of free tools to build a statistic repository, called SONAR, containing detailed information of mobile nodes (mobile hosts and mobile routers). These tools support several operating systems, protocol stacks and network access technologies. Users can send statistic information to the data repository, and the repository shows the history and some analysis results of collected data. At the moment, SONAR is designed for a mobile router inside a car because it is the only running testbed of IP Mobility in an actual environment. And the analysis results are aimed at being used for classification of mobility, IPv6 layer benchmark (MIPv6/NEMO protocol evaluation), L2 benchmark and correlation between L2 and IP layer.

Milestone

January 2006:Setup the SONAR framework (this page, tools to get the data, database, analysis mechanism).
March 2006:Release the pre-version tools.
April-June 2006:Play with the live testbed.
July 2006:Release the tools.

Publication

For the details, please refer to the following publications: