This paper proposes a protocol to support mobile hosts in IPv6 by introducing a new addressing architecture and a new hop-by-hop option. This protocol also allows a mobile host to communicate with another host via a firewall machine which drops packets from untrustworthy hosts. The new addressing scheme is based on the separation of the identifier and the location of a mobile host. This is a straightforward implementation of the basic concept of VIP, a protocol providing seamless mobility in IPv4. The new hop-by-hop option of IPv6 allows a firewall machine to authenticate the source host of the forwarded packet with negligible overhead. The author plans to implement this protocol on several operating systems in the near future.

Cognitive radio in network core devices, such as basestations, is being considered as a spectrum management solution for future society's communication demands. Aside from new resource allocation algorithms, efficient inter- and intra-protocol processing should be considered. In this paper, we propose an opportunistic cross layer architecture called COmmon Layer Architecture (COLA) for information exchange between arbitrary layers in New Generation Networks with network-oriented cognitive radio. COLA provides a means for faster information exchange between OSI layers by introducing abstraction at each layer and designing primitives for communication between each abstraction layer. Emulation and simulation results showed improvements, compared to conventional networks, in disrupted service (42% reduction), average delay (47% reduced) and packet drop ratio (22% reduced) in the scenario analyzed.

Using “clean-slate approach” to redesign the Internet has attracted considerable attention. ZNA (Z Network Architecture) is one of clean-slate network architectures based on the layered model. The major features of ZNA are as follows: (1) introducing the session layer to provide the applications with sophisticated communication services, (2) employing inter-node cross-layer cooperation to adapt to the dynamically changing network conditions, (3) splitting the node identifier and the node locator for mobility, multi-homing, and heterogeneity of network layer protocols, (4) splitting the data plane and the control plane for high manageability, and (5) introducing a recursive layered model to support network virtualization. This paper focuses on the first three topics as well as the basic design of ZNA.

TCP/IP, the foundation of the current Internet, assumes a sufficiently low packet loss rate for links in communication path. On the other hand, for communication services such as mobile and wireless communications, communication link tends to be disruptive. In this paper, we propose Layer-5 temporally-spliced path protocol (L5-TSPP), which provides disruption-tolerance in the L5 temporally-spliced path (L5-TSP), as one of the communication paths provided by Layer-5 (L5-paths). We design and implement an API for using L5-paths (L5 API). The L5 API is designed and implemented to support not only POSIX systems but also non-POSIX systems. L5 API and L5-TSPP are implemented in the user space in Go language. The measurement results show that L5-TSP achieves lower and more stable connection establishment time and better end-to-end throughput in the presence of disruption than conventional communication paths.

This paper proposes a protocol called vLIN6 which supports both network mobility and host mobility in IPv6. There are several proposals to support network mobility and host mobility. Network Mobility (NEMO) Basic Support Protocol has several problems such as pinball routing, large header overhead due to multiple levels of tunneling, and a single point of failure. Optimized NEMO (ONEMO) and Mobile IP with Address Translation (MAT) are solutions to provide route optimization, but they generate a lot of signaling messages at a handover. In vLIN6, packet relay is required only once regardless of the nested level in network mobility while optimal routing is always provided in host mobility. A fixed-sized extension header is used in network mobility while there is no header overhead in host mobility. vLIN6 is more tolerant of network failure and mobility agent failure than NEMO Basic Support Protocol. It also allows ordinary IPv6 nodes to communicate with mobile nodes and nodes in the mobile network. We implemented vLIN6 on NetBSD 2.0 Release. Our measurement results showed vLIN6 can provide host mobility and network mobility with low overhead.

The evolution of Internet, the growth of Internet users and the new enabled technological capabilities place new requirements to form the Future Internet. Many features improvements and challenges were imposed to build a better Internet, including securing roaming of data and services over multiple administrative domains. In this research, we propose a multi-domain access control infrastructure to authenticate and authorize roaming users through the use of the Diameter protocol and EAP. The Diameter Protocol is a AAA protocol that solves the problems of previous AAA protocols such as RADIUS. The Diameter EAP Application is one of Diameter applications that extends the Diameter Base Protocol to support authentication using EAP. The contributions in this paper are: 1) first implementation of Diameter EAP Application, called DiamEAP, capable of practical authentication and authorization services in a multi-domain environment, 2) extensibility design capable of adding any new EAP methods, as loadable plugins, without modifying the main part, and 3) provision of EAP-TLS plugin as one of the most secure EAP methods. DiamEAP Server basic performances were evaluated and tested in a real multi-domain environment where 200 users attempted to access network using the EAP-TLS method during an event of 4 days. As evaluation results, the processing time of DiamEAP using the EAP-TLS plugin for authentication of 10 requests is about 20 ms while that for 400 requests/second is about 1.9 second. Evaluation and operation results show that DiamEAP is scalable and stable with the ability to handle more than 6 hundreds of authentication requests per second without any crashes. DiamEAP is supported by the AAA working group of the WIDE Project.

With rapid growth of producing high-resolution digital contents such as Full HD, 4K, and 8K movies, the demand for low cost and high throughput sharing of content files is increasing at digital content productions. In order to meet this demand, we have proposed DRIP (Distributed chunks Retrieval and Integration Procedure), a storage and retrieval mechanism for large file sharing using forward error correction (FEC) and global dispersed storage. DRIP was confirmed that it contributes to low cost and high throughput sharing. This paper describes the design and implementation of Content Espresso, a distributed large file sharing system for digital content productions using DRIP, and presents performance evaluations. We set up experimental environment using 79 physical machines including 72 inexpensive storage servers, and evaluate file metadata access performance, file storage/retrieval performance, FEC block size, and system availability by emulating global environments. The results confirm that Content Espresso has capability to deal with 15,000 requests per second, achieves 1 Gbps for file storage, and achieves more than 3 Gbps for file retrieval. File storage and retrieval performance are not significantly affected by the network conditions. Thus, we conclude that Content Espresso is capable of a global scale file sharing system for digital content productions.

In LTE (Long Term Evolution) / LTE-Advanced (LTE-A) system, the user-plane for a user equipment (UE) is provided by tunneling, which increases header overhead, processing overhead, and management overhead. In addition, the LTE-A system does not support moving cells which are composed of a mobile Relay Node (RN) and UEs attached to the mobile RN. Although there are several proposals for moving cells in the LTE-A system and the 5G system, all of them rely on tunneling for the user-plane, which means that none of them avoid the tunneling overheads. This paper proposes MocLis, a moving cell support protocol based on a Locator/ID split approach. MocLis does not use tunneling. Nested moving cells are supported. Signaling cost for handover of a moving cell is independent of the number of UEs and nested RNs in the moving cell. A MocLis prototype, implemented in Linux, includes user space daemons and modified kernel. Measurements show that the attachment time and handover time are short enough for practical use. MocLis has higher TCP throughput than the tunneling based approaches.

There are demands for high-speed and stable ground-to-train optical communication as a network environment for trains. The existing ground-to-train optical communication system developed by the authors uses a camera and a QPD (Quadrant photo diode) to capture beacon light. The problem with the existing system is that it is impossible to identify the ground station. In the system proposed in this paper, a beacon light modulated with the ID of the ground station is transmitted, and the ground station is identified by demodulating the image from the dual-port camera on the opposite side. In this paper, we developed an actual system and conducted experiments using a car on the road. The results showed that only one packet was lost with the ping command every 1 ms near handover. Although the communication device itself has a bandwidth of 100 Mbps, the throughput before and after the handover was about 94 Mbps, and only dropped to about 89.4 Mbps during the handover.

This paper presents a new mobility protocol that supports multiple namespaces on IPv6 networks. Our proposed protocol framework allows a mobile node to specify a correspondent node by a name that is defined in any namespace as a node identifier. This technique removes certain restrictions on the space of node identifiers and allows mobile nodes to communicate with each other regardless of their location. Mobile nodes negotiate a pseudo node identifier, which is unique between the two nodes, with a correspondent node that is identified by the name. We make this pseudo node identifier compatible with the IPv6 address format; we can thus use existing IPv6 applications with our proposed mobility framework. This framework is based on Location Independent Network Architecture (LINA), and provides mobility support in a simple fashion and with low protocol overhead. We also demonstrate how to provide anonymity to our mobility protocol by using a dynamic pseudo node identifier. Our prototype implementation shows minimal overhead compared to a conventional IPv6 implementation.

This paper argues that a layered approach is more suitable for Information Centric Networking (ICN) than a narrow-waist approach and proposes an ICN mechanism called ZINK. In ZINK, a location-independent content name is resolved to a list of node IDs of content servers in the application layer and a node ID is mapped to a node locator in the network layer, which results in scalable locator-based routing. An ID/Locator split approach in the network layer can efficiently support client/serever mobility. Efficient content transfer is achieved by using sophisticated functions in the transport layer such as multipath transfer for bandwidth aggregation or fault tolerance. Existing well-tuned congestion control in the transport layer achieves fairness not only among ICN flows but also among ICN flows and other flows. A proof-of concept prototype of ZINK is implemented on an IPv6 stack. Evaluation results show that the time for content finding is practical, efficient content transfer is possible by using multipath transfer, and the mobility support mechanism is scalable as shown in a nationwide experiment environment in Japan.

Mobile IPv6 is an IETF (Internet Engineering Task Force) standard which permits node mobility in IPv6. To manage mobility, it establishes a centralized mediator, Home Agent (HA), which inevitably introduces several penalties like triangular routing, single point of failure and limited scalability. Some later extensions such as Global HAHA, which employed multiple HAs, made to alleviate above shortcomings by introducing Distributed Mobility Management (DMM) approach. However, Multiple HA model will not be beneficial, unless the HAs are located finely. But, no major research paper has focused on locating HAs. This paper examines impact of single and multiple HA placements in data plane, by using an Autonomous System (AS) level topology consisting of 30,000 nodes with several evaluation criteria. All possible placements of HA(s) are analysed on a fair, random set of 30,000 node pairs of Mobile Nodes (MN) and Correspondent Nodes (CN). Ultimate result provides a concise account of different HA placements: i.e. cost centrality interprets performance variation better than degree centrality or betweenness. 30,000 ASs are classified into three groups in terms of Freeman's closeness index and betweenness centrality: 1) high range group, 2) mid range group, and 3) low range group. Considering dual HA placement, if one HA is placed in an AS in the high range group, then any subsequent HA placement gives worse results, thus single HA placement is adequate. With the mid range group, similar results are demonstrated by the upper portion of the group, but the rest yields better results when combined with another HA. Finally, from the perspective of low range group, if the subsequent HA is placed in the high range group, it gives better result. On the other hand, betweenness based grouping yields varying results. Consequently, this study reveals that the Freeman's closeness index is most appropriate in determining impacts of HA placements among considered indices.

Recently, application demands placed on the network have become more multifaceted. Highly functional application-to-application communication services such as bandwidth aggregation, fault tolerant communication, and delay/disruption tolerant networking (DTN) were developed independently in the network layer, the transport layer, and the application layer. As a result, protocol layering has become complicated. This paper proposes to insert Layer-5 (L5) between the application layer and the transport layer to separate communication policies and communication mechanisms to make protocol layering clearer. The transport layer (L4) provides end-to-end communication mechanisms such as reliable byte stream while L5 realizes communication policies such as bandwidth aggregation by combining the communication mechanisms in L4. This paper proposes five types of L5-paths as communication policies: (1) the L5 bundled path for bandwidth aggregation or fault tolerant communication, (2) the L5 spatially-spliced path for communication with middleboxes, (3) the L5 temporally-spliced path for DTN, (4) the L5 spliced-bundled path, and (5) the L5 bundled over spatially-spliced path. An application can select and use an appropriate L5-path depending on the network circumstances through a common API. A prototype of L5 is implemented in the Linux user space as a library to make deployment and maintenance easier. An evaluation shows that establishment time of L5-paths is short enough and performance of L5-paths is comparable or superior to existing technologies.

This paper presents a new network architecture called LINA that provides node mobility. The basic concept of LINA is separation of the node identifier and the interface locator. Although there are several protocols based on such a concept, they do not address issues that arise when dealing with an entire network architecture. LINA is a holistic architecture covering the network layer to the application layer in order to support node mobility. Overhead incurred by separation of the node identifier and the interface locator is minimized in LINA by introducing the embedded addressing model. This paper also presents a new protocol called LIN6 that supports IPv6 mobility. LIN6 is an application of LINA to IPv6 and is fully compatible with IPv6. It has several advantages in comparison to Mobile IPv6, e.g. less protocol overhead. Our prototype implementation of LIN6 shows minimal overhead compared to a conventional IPv6 implementation.

To support mobility, multihoming, routing scalability, and security, there are a lot of proposals based on ID/Locator split approach not only for the current Internet but also for the future Internet. However, none of them meet the requirements for practical operation such as (1) support heterogeneous network layer protocols, (2) scalability of ID/Locator mapping system, (3) independence of mapping information management, and (4) avoidance of locator leakage beyond the administrative boundary. This paper proposes a network layer protocol called Z Network Protocol (ZNP) for the future Internet based on the clean slate approach. ZNP supports heterogeneity of network layer protocols by “Internetworking with a Common ID Space”. Its mapping systems meet the requirements (1)–(4) described above. For manipulating the mapping systems, Z Control Message Protocol (ZCMP) is designed. For resolving the link layer (L2) address from the ZNP Locator, Z Neighbor Discovery Protocol (ZNDP) is designed. We implement ZNP and ZNDP in the Linux kernel, ZCMP in the user space and measure the times needed for transmission, reception, forwarding, and locator conversion. The results show the practicability of ZNP as a network layer protocol for the future Internet.

There is a strong demand to enjoy broadband and stable Internet connectivity not only in office and the home but also in high-speed train. Several systems are providing high-speed train with Internet connectivity using various technologies such as leaky coaxial cable (LCX), Wi-Fi, and WiMAX. However, their actual throughputs are less than 2Mbps. We developed a free-space optical (FSO) communication transceiver called LaserTrainComm2014 that achieves the throughput of 1 Gbps between the ground and a train. LaserTrainComm2014 employs a high-speed image sensor for coarse tracking and a quadrant photo-diode (QPD) for accurate tracking. Since the image captured by the high-speed image sensor has several types of noise, image processing is necessary to detect the beacon light of the other LaserTrainComm2014. As a result of field experiments in a vehicle test course, LaserTrainComm2014 achieves handover time of 21 milliseconds (ms) in the link layer at the speed of 60km/h. Even if the network layer signaling takes time of 10 milliseconds, the total communication disruption time due to handover is short enough to provide passengers with Internet connectivity for live streaming Internet applications such as YouTube, Internet Radio, and Skype.

We propose the Geographical Location Information (GLI) system that maps a mobile entity on the Internet to a geographical position. Users can look up the latest geographical location information of registered mobile entities (forward-lookup) and can also search for mobile entities within a specified area (reverse-lookup). The GLI system consists of home and area servers. The home server maintains latest geographical location information of the mobile entities and processes forward-lookup requests. The area server maintains the latest geographical location information of the mobile entities in the area that it manages and processes reverse-lookup requests. To provide a highly scalable system, home and area servers are managed in a distributed manner based on a hierarchical server structure and delegation of authority to servers that manage lower layers. To reduce the amount of traffic due to distributed management, the delegation information of authority is cached by the servers. In our performance evaluation of the GLI system, the prototype implementation can handle 4,500-8,000 requests/sec for location lookup and location registration. We found that 52 home servers and 33 area servers are enough to handle all cars in Japan under some assumed parameters through the performance evaluation.

In this paper, we propose an architecture for environmental information services that make it possible for applications to adapt in dynamically changing environments. These services provide information necessary for applications to adapt to its environment. Unlike other information services, the information provided includes not only raw information but also abstract or policy-applied information. The variety of information enables applications to choose suitable level of information. A simple adaptive application can use highly abstract information instead of detailed raw information required by complicated adaptive applications. The policy-applied information enables adaptive applications to share decisions by the user and cooperate among them. Applications can efficiently adapt to changes in the environment since our architecture provides notification of these changes. This notification does not disturb applications since the conditions for the notification are controlled by each application. We apply the proposed architecture to a mobile internetworking environment and present a prototype implementation of environmental information services called CM1. We also discuss our primary evaluation of CM1 with the Personal File System, which is a network file system with dynamic adaptation features, for mobile internetworking environments.