Date of Award

2008

Document Type

Master Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Engineering (Research)

Department

Electronic Engineering

First Advisor

Dr. Dirk Pesch

Second Advisor

Dr. Andreas Timm-Giel

Abstract

Future mobile networks are anticipated to have support to access heterogeneous access technologies. An important question in such environments is the decisions on when to use what access network. These decisions must take the users and mobile network operators’ perspectives into consideration. The operators usually have a focus of always-best-managed networks while the users have an always-best-connected focus. A key enabler of such environments is the use of policies to perform these handover decisions. These policies, which must be dynamic in nature, should be configurable when the requirements change. Policy decisions are always made based on the current context of mobile networks. Context information refers to static and dynamic information about mobile networks. Networking Context Aware Policy Environment (NetCAPE) is a policy based mobility management architecture for such mobile networks. NetCAPE is based on the policy framework defined by the IETF and DMTF. It consists of Policy Decision Points (PDPs), Policy Enforcement Points (PEPs) and meters that work together to make decisions based on the regulatory, operator and user policies. The PDPs make decisions using the policies defined in the policy repository and the context information in context repositories. The context information is built by the meters distributed in the mobile networks. Decisions are finally executed by the PEPs that control different network elements of mobile networks. The work in this thesis consists of defining this new architecture (NetCAPE), detailing the operations and mechanisms its constituent components, implementing it and evaluating its performance against a non-NetCAPE based environment.

Access Level

info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess

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