Trigger management mechanisms

Current protocol stacks can handle only a handful of events that may trigger actions for mobility management, such as signal strength indicators and cell load. We argue for new mechanisms that can deal with a greater variety of triggering events, which may originate from any component of the node's protocol stack as well as mobility management entities within the network. We present the main concepts that govern our trigger management mechanisms (TMM), which aim at operating in a richer mobility management framework, and enable the deployment of new applications and services. After summarizing the architectural requirements with respect to trigger collection, processing, storage, and dissemination, we introduce a real implementation of TMM on commodity mobile devices. We briefly review our testbed environment and present experimental results using TMM to drive a lossless streaming video session handover between a laptop and a PDA. We position the current TMM design and implementation within the ambient networks architecture, centering in particular on the use of policies to steer TMM operation, and the role that TMM can play in an information service infrastructure. Finally, we outline current and future work items (19 refs.)