Multi-hop Multi-path Cooperative Connectivity guided by Mobility, Throughput, and Energy Awareness: a Middleware Approach

The widespread diffusion of portable devices with multiple wireless interfaces, e.g., UMTS/GPRS, IEEE 802.11, and/or Bluetooth, is enabling multi-homing and multi-channel scenarios, possibly made up by multi-hop cooperative paths towards the traditional Internet. We claim that there is the need for novel middleware, aware of innovative context information, to select and dynamically re-configure the most suitable interfaces and connectivity providers for each client application. In particular, novel middleware should effectively exploit concise and light-weight context indicators about expected node mobility, path throughput, and energy availability to take proper connectivity management decisions at session startup and to promptly re-configure them with limited overhead at runtime. Here, we present how our MMHC middleware originally uses mobility/throughput/energy context to manage connectivity opportunities effectively, i) by filter-ing out connectivity opportunities that are estimated as insufficiently reliable, and ii) by carefully evaluating the residual candidates in two distinguished local/global man-agement phases to achieve the most suitable tradeoff be-tween promptness and management costs.