Multiscalable Networks
The growth of mobile devices has presented some interesting new challenges for networks:
- incompatible handover – handover from one physical network to another may be difficult because of very different routing, address and quality aspects (e.g., if you want to automatically hand your mobile phone session over to your voice-over-IP service when you get to your office, things get very complicated)
- mobile networks – if a whole network is mobile, things get very complicated as it moves around
- different scales – a very small mobile device may not have the memory to support a large, complex protocol stack; a large, fixed device may not justify the latency cost in dynamically adding missing functionality
- changing standards – the relatively mutable nature of the physical layer of wireless protocols leads to a proliferation of standards
Initially, the intent with this project is to explore new ways of designing protocol stacks to make the kind of flexibility supporting communication on devices of very different scales feasible.