Mobility-aware Middleware for Self-organizing Heterogeneous Networks with Multihop Multipath Connectivity

The full exploitation of multi-hop multi-path con-nectivity opportunities offered by heterogeneous wire-less interfaces could allow innovative deployment sce-narios where mobile nodes dynamically self-organize to offer/exploit Internet connectivity at best. To seam-lessly enable the potential of this scenario, we claim the suitability of novel, mobility-aware, and applica-tion-layer middleware that effectively considers a lim-ited set of practical indicators for a coarse-grained dynamic estimation of expected reliability/quality of multi-hop paths. To validate the claim, we have devel-oped an innovative middleware that manages the du-rability/throughput-aware formation and selection of different multi-hop paths simultaneously, based on practical lightweight indicators on node mobility and wireless network characteristics. The reported results show the effective performance results of our middle-ware and, more in general, the feasibility of applica-tion-layer middlewares with simplifying estimation assumptions to effectively take mobility-aware connec-tivity management decisions with limited overhead.