Session mobility solution for client-based application migration scenarios

Application migration is a promising technique to enable users of computational devices to continue a task even though the executing device changes. One key challenge to realise application migrations is to maintain the network sessions in case a network based application is migrated. This article presents a solution to maintain network sessions in application migration scenarios. We develop a prototype of the session mobility solution and an application to demonstrate the use of session preservation. We evaluate the performance of the prototype in terms of TCP connection duration. Since the last hop network in migration scenarios is often a wireless network, the experimental evaluation is performed in parameter settings motivated by wireless scenarios. An analytic model for the migration duration is developed and validated with the experimental results. The results show that the chosen model can be used to estimate the network contribution to the duration of a migration. Being able to predict the migration duration is an important part of developing an automatic decision mechanism concerning when to migrate in order to enhance the user experience.