Mobile-PEP: Satellite terminal handover preserving service continuity

Mobile user terminals allow to access different networks through several interfaces. Seamless communications is an essential requirement and service continuity is its main metric from user perspective. Mobile IPv6, ad-hoc routing, dynamic link layer protocol, SDN paradigm greatly facilitate mobility and network flexibility. Nonetheless, full mobility is limited by NAT routers or proxy agents, which break end-to-end semantic, as Performance Enhancing Proxies (PEPs), mandatory component over satellite networks to optimize performance. PEP spoofs TCP connections to end-users and hides connection context to the end-user control. Thus, any dynamic path change leads to the drop of the ongoing connections impairing service continuity. In this paper, we present an enhanced PEP implementation, Mobile-PEP, able to manage handovers without connection context transfer. Main operations and added value in several satellite-based operational scenarios are herein shown, leveraging on a Mobile-PEP prototype implementation.