Disruption-tolerant sessions for seamless mobility

Current ubiquitous computing technologies provide access to customized, contextual, and location-based services. Device mobility, however, is frequently associated with communication delays, link disruptions due to signal loss, and changes in IP address. As a result, connection-oriented applications may fail and node location strategies should not rely on node addresses. In this paper, we propose the use of communication sessions to create mobility-aware applications that do not break with transmission delays or disruptions. The concept of these communication sessions is embedded in the basic network socket API functions and operates transparently with the applications. Sessions provide application level support to keep track of the location of peer nodes, to detect connection disruptions, and to suspend and resume transmissions. Experiments show our approach offers superior performance of the general IP layer mobility solution, with no need to implement or adapt software at the core network infrastructure.