Seamless mobile applications across heterogeneous Internet access

Abstract

With the growing popularity of the mobile Internet, end users would demand seamless continuation of their Internet applications as they hop across different access technologies and administrative domains during an ongoing session. An important technology to enable this is mobile IP and its companion seamless handoff protocols, which are currently under development in the IETF. These protocols can potentially provide the mobile end user with a seamless IP connectivity. However, additional techniques may be required to ensure seamless continuation of the user's Internet applications after an IP-level handoff. In this paper, we focus on the handoff scenario in which there is a need to relocate (or provision) certain application-specific functionality to ensure the seamless continuation of the user's application after handoff. We provide a solution framework called the application context transfer (ACT) framework to address this need and describe its application to such handoff scenarios.