Managing mobility and adaptation in upcoming 802.21 enabled devices

One emerging characteristic of electronic devices is the increasing number of connectivity interfaces (aka NICs1) towards the outside world. That obviously translates in a set of technical issues related to their management in order to provide seamless connectivity when the connections move from one interface to another. The IEEE 802.21 is a recent effort of IEEE that aims at providing a general interface for the management of NICs. In this paper we discuss how the upcoming standard may be effectively exploited in a mobile context in order to hide network heterogeneity to end users. To accomplish this task, we propose a centralized element called Mobility Manager interfacing with the 802.21 sublayer and responsible for the application of connectivity policies. Based on a real testbed, we showed that the new standard and the MM can be used to improve network performance experienced by the end user. Moreover we showed how the MM can interact with adaptive applications in order to improve further the range of usability of real-time applications.