Managing Mobility of Users in a Virtual Network

  • Authors:

  • A. Hooda;A. Karmouch;S. Abu-Hakima

  • Affiliations:

  • University of Ottawa, School of Information Technology & Engineering, 161 Louis Pasteur St. Ottawa, ON, Canada, K1N 6N5. amin@sol.genie.uottawa.ca;University of Ottawa, School of Information Technology & Engineering, 161 Louis Pasteur St. Ottawa, ON, Canada, K1N 6N5. karmouch@site.uottawa.ca;AmikaNow! Corp. 22 Balding Cres., Kanata, ON, Canada, K2K 2L4. Suhayya@amikanow.com

  • Venue:
  • Multimedia Tools and Applications
  • Year:
  • 1999

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Abstract

Terminal and personal mobility are the fundamentalcharacteristics of Nomadic Computing. However, personalmobility provides a greater degree of flexibility, creating anenvironment in which a user roams in network without a wirelesslaptop or a mobile phone and yet enjoys anytime, anywherenetwork accessibility. This work presents Nomad‘s PersonalAccess System (NPAS): a software system at OSI application layerthat provides a personal mobility environment within a virtual,private network, spanning different organizational networks. Itimplements dynamic association between a user and shared devicesassociated with a new location. The dynamic mapping of users todevices is achieved using Internet‘s LDAP distributed directory.The LDAP‘s distributed directory provides services and locationdata to the network—thus incoming and outgoing messages can beeasily routed to the current location of a nomad. The ability toknow the current location of a nomad increases his/heraccessibility to and from other people. Therefore, NPAS alsoaddresses the messaging services and suggests a solution basedon agents. This work is motivated by the larger project of theMobile Agents Alliance, a collaborative effort that includes theNational Research Council of Canada, the University of Ottawa,and Mitel Corporation.