Programmable mobile networks

Existing mobile systems (e.g., mobile IP, mobile ATM and third generation cellular systems) lack the intrinsic architectural flexibility to deal with the complexity of supporting adaptive mobile applications in wireless and mobile environments. We believe that there is a need to develop alternative network architectures from the existing ones to deal with the demands placed on underlying mobile signalling, adaptation management and wireless transport systems in support of new mobile services, e.g. interactive multimedia and web access. In this paper we present the design, implementation and evaluation of mobiware, a middleware technology that enables the introduction of new services in mobile networks. Mobiware provides a toolkit that service providers can utilize to build services that can dynamically exploit the intrinsic scalable properties of mobile multimedia applications in response to time-varying mobile network conditions. Based on an open programmable networking paradigm, mobiware runs on mobile devices, wireless access points and mobile-capable switch/routers providing a set of open programmable interfaces and distributed objects for adaptive mobile networking. Mobiware is software-intensive and is built on CORBA and Java distributed object technologies. The source code for mobiware v1.0 is freely available (comet.columbia.edu/mobiware) for experimentation.