Addressing Network Heterogeneity and Bandwidth Scarcity in Future Wireless Data Networks

by Hsieh, Hung-Yun

To provide mobile hosts with seamless and broadband wireless Internet access, two fundamental problems that need to be tackled in wireless networking are transparently supporting host mobility and effectively utilizing wireless bandwidth. The increasing heterogeneity of wireless networks and the proliferation of wireless devices, however, severely expose the limitations of the paradigms adopted by existing solutions. In this work, we explore new research directions for addressing network heterogeneity and bandwidth scarcity in future wireless data networks. In addressing network heterogeneity, we motivate a transport layer solution for transparent mobility support across heterogeneous wireless networks. We establish parallelism and transpositionality as two fundamental principles to be incorporated in designing such a transport layer solution. In addressing bandwidth scarcity, we motivate a cooperative wireless network model for scalable bandwidth utilization with wireless user population. We establish base station assistance and multi-homed peer relay as two fundamental principles to be incorporated in designing such a cooperative wireless network model. We present instantiations based on the established principles respectively, and demonstrate their performance and functionality gains through theoretic analysis, packet simulation, and testbed emulation.