Enhancing User Mobility with Network Service Maps

Many mobile networking scenarios, such as campus WLAN roaming and public WLAN hotspot usage, require support for network selection and automatic network association on the mobile client side. In this paper, we analyze these and other scenarios with respect to use cases of network information services and infer a set of requirements that have led to the design of a network information service for supporting nomadic and mobile WLAN usage. Our approach called Network Service Maps can be characterized as provider- and network-independent, representing an extensible information service that is built on the notion that receivers obtain service descriptions from arbitrary sources over different networks and compose individual service maps based on filtering with respect to current location, sought-after service, personal preferences, etc.

It differs from existing network information systems in its generality and network- and topology-independence, and it differs from existing service-location approaches in its applicability to wide-area, location-based service description distribution. The information service is based on a general service description information framework that provides different transport mechanisms for supporting heterogeneous network environments and on a data model for service description that enables receivers and transceivers to flexibly (re-) composing received service information with respect to different criteria.