Context-aware session and network control in future internet

Abstract

With the rapidly increasing interest of citizens and businesses in multimedia group services, personalization, contextawareness and seamless mobility, the communication can no longer be limited to high speed network or devices. In future scenarios, context-aware services and multicasting will together drive a new trend, since context-awareness can exploit situations in which users share the same interests and request similar services, increasing the effectiveness of session and network control. However, context-aware networks impose several challenges: any change to context, such as, location, mobility, velocity, preferences, presence, etc., can change the overall services and network environments, requiring completely restructuring of the network and multicast sessions in a very dynamic way. This dynamicity imposes scalability problems in current networks. In this paper, we present an initial future Internet architecture for context-aware network and service control, which enables the support of context-aware users and services, seamless reacting to the context changes with minimal impacts to the services and multicast control. For this purpose, we provide a network that is able to interact with context-based services, choose and change the session and network characteristics based on the context, both for the environment, user, network, and sessions. To address the dynamicity of the network, we provide the support of multicast abstract transport trees able to abstract the network changes to the running sessions transport, and limiting the impact of all the context dynamics in the user sessions.