Design and implementation of a SIP-based mobile and vehicular wireless network with push mechanism

Abstract

As portable devices are gaining more popularity, maintaining Internet connectivity anytime and anywhere becomes critical, particularly for mobile and vehicular networks. Network mobility (NEMO) and Internet Protocol mobility are gaining more and more importance. In this paper, we develop a Session Initiation Protocol (SIP)-based mobile network architecture to support NEMO for vehicular applications. We propose to form a mobile ad hoc network (MANET) by the mobile hosts (MHs) inside a vehicle or a cluster of vehicles. The MANET is connected to the outside world via a SIP-based Mobile Network Gateway (SIP-MNG), which is equipped with one or multiple external wireless interfaces and some internal IEEE 802.11 interfaces. The external interfaces of the SIP-MNG support Internet connectivity by aggregating user traffic to and from the Internet. In addition, exploiting the session information carried by SIP signaling, the SIP-MNG supports resource management and call admission control for the MHs. However, wireless access incurs charges, power consumption, and overhead of mobility management. So, it is desirable to allow the SIP-MNG to disconnect its external interfaces when necessary. To guarantee that users inside the mobile network will not lose any incoming request, we propose a push mechanism through short message service to wake up these wireless interfaces in an on-demand manner. We show the detailed signaling to support such a mechanism. The proposed system is fully compatible with existing SIP standards. Our real prototyping experience and some experimental results are also reported.