Trigger management and mobile node cooperation

This chapter addresses one of the challenges in cooperative networking, namely, mobility support in a heterogeneous ambient network environment. We motivate the need for efficient mechanisms for handling the large amount of network and channel state information required in assisting fast handovers and network and service adaptation strategies. Managing a variety of network and protocol events and triggering information is a challenging task even in a homogeneous networking environment when different mobility schemes (node, network, session) and application adaptation are considered and, not unexpectedly, the heterogeneity of access networks increases further the amount of such information. We present triggering management mechanisms which efficiently handle triggering information at node and network level, dealing with a greater variety of events originating from any component of the node’s protocol stack as well as mobility management entities within the network. We then discuss the benefits of arranging mobile nodes into specific mobile routing groups, and how such approaches can benefit from the availability of the triggering management mechanisms in an ambient network environment.