Autonomic Control and Personalization of a Wireless Access Network

As ICT services are becoming more ubiquitous and mobile and access technologies grow to be more heterogeneous and complex, we are witnessing the increasing importance of two related needs: (i) users need to be able to configure and personalize their services with minimal effort; (ii) operators desire to engineer and manage their networks easily and efficiently, limiting human agency as far as possible. We propose a possible solution to reach these goals. Our vision, developed in the so-called Simplicity project, is based on a personalization device, which, together with a brokerage framework, offers transparent service configuration and runtime adaptation, according to user preferences and computing/networking context conditions. The capabilities of this framework can be exploited: (i) on the user side, to personalize services, to improve the portability of services over heterogeneous terminals and devices, to adapt services to available networking and terminal technologies; (ii) on the network side, to give operators more powerful tools to define new solutions for distributed, technology-independent, self-organizing, autonomic networking systems. Such systems could be designed so as to be able to react autonomously to changing contexts and environments. In this paper, we first describe the main aspects of the Simplicity solution. We then want to show that our approach is indeed viable. To prove this point, we present an application which exploits the capabilities of the Simplicity system: a mechanism to drive mobile users towards the most appropriate point of access to the network, taking into account both user preferences and network context. We use simulation to evaluate the performance of this procedure in a specific case study, where the aim is to balance the load in an 802.11b access network scenario. The numerical results show the effectiveness of the proposed procedure when compared to a legacy scenario and to another solution from literature. To give ample proof of the feasibility of our solution, we also designed and implemented a real prototype. The prototype enables not only the load to be balanced among different 802.11 access points, but also network and application services to be differentiated as a function of user profiles and network load. The main aspects of this prototype are presented in this paper.