MOBILITY-AWARE MIDDLEWARE FOR SELF-ORGANIZING HETEROGENEOUS NETWORKS WITH MULTIHOP MULTIPATH CONNECTIVITY

The full exploitation of multihop multipath connectivity opportunities offered by heterogeneous wireless interfaces could allow innovative deployment scenarios where mobile nodes dynamically self-organize to best offer/exploit Internet connectivity. To seamlessly enable the potential of this scenario, we claim the suitability of novel mobility-aware and application-layer middleware that effectively considers a limited set of practical indicators for a coarse-grained dynamic estimation of expected reliability/quality of multihop paths. To validate the claim, we have developed an innovative middleware that manages the durability/throughput-aware formation and selection of different multihop paths simultaneously, based on practical lightweight indicators of node mobility and wireless network characteristics. The reported results show the effective performance results of our middleware and, in general, the feasibility of application-layer middleware solutions with simplifying estimation assumptions to effectively make mobility-aware connectivity management decisions with limited overhead.