Dr George Kamel

From a network perspective, the major challenge in providing seamless connectivity whilst maintaining the required level of QoS to users results from the negative interactions that occur between mobility and QoS. These interactions, particularly those of mobility and QoS, have been the subject of much research. In this paper, we discuss the various approaches that have already been taken to combine QoS and mobility mechanisms, and present a new framework to combine such mechanisms with the aim of reducing the negative interactions that might arise between them. We propose the concept of enhanced nodes which is a special IP router with an extra sub-layer of mobility, QoS and security features. Our framework is illustrated with an example of a QoS-based mobility selection mechanism.

The Internet, the de facto platform for large-scale content distribution, suffers from two issues that limit its manageability, efficiency and evolution: (1) The IP-based Internet is host-centric and agnostic to the content being delivered and (2) the tight coupling of the control and data planes restrict its manageability, and subsequently the possibility to create dynamic alternative paths for efficient content delivery. Here we present the CURLING system that leverages the emerging Information- Centric Networking paradigm for enabling cost-efficient Internetscale content delivery by exploiting multicasting and in-network caching. Following the software-defined networking concept that decouples the control and data planes, CURLING adopts an inter-domain hop-by-hop content resolution mechanism that allows network operators to dynamically enforce/change their network policies in locating content sources and optimizing content delivery paths. Content publishers and consumers may also control content access according to their preferences. Based on both analytical modelling and simulations using real domainlevel Internet subtopologies, we demonstrate how CURLING supports efficient Internet-scale content delivery without the necessity for radical changes to the current Internet.

Information-centric networking (ICN) is an emerging networking paradigm that places content identifiers rather than host identifiers at the core of the mechanisms and protocols used to deliver content to end-users. Such a paradigm allows routers enhanced with content-awareness to play a direct role in the routing and resolution of content requests from users, without any knowledge of the specific locations of hosted content. However, to facilitate good network traffic engineering and satisfactory user QoS, content routers need to exchange advanced network knowledge to assist them with their resolution decisions. In order to maintain the location-independency tenet of ICNs, such knowledge (known as context information) needs to be independent of the locations of servers. To this end, we propose CAINE — Context-Aware Information-centric Network Ecosystem — which enables context-based operations to be intrinsically supported by the underlying ICN routing and resolution functions. Our approach has been designed to maintain the location-independence philosophy of ICNs by associating context information directly to content rather than to the physical entities such as servers and network elements in the content ecosystem, while ensuring scalability. Through simulation, we show that based on such location-independent context information, CAINE is able to facilitate traffic engineering in the network, while not posing a significant control signalling burden on the network

The demand for resource-hungry applications whilst on the move is growing, and is being fuelled in particular by the increasing availability of high-quality multimedia services. To this end, micro-mobility protocols play an important role in providing seamless data delivery to terminals as they roam across different networks. However, such protocols typically lead to bottleneck congestion occurring within the access network. Within moving networks, in which a potentially vast number of terminals are present, the bottleneck congestion problem is significantly magnified, and can lead to increased call dropping probability and/or quality-of-service degradation. This paper therefore presents a novel mechanism, designed to ensure that the continuity of all sessions of a moving network is seamlessly preserved as it performs handovers to and within micro-mobility- enabled access networks