Perimeter (EU Project)
PERIMETER (full title: User-centric paradigm for seamless mobility in future Internet) is a European Commission funded project under the Seventh Framework Programme of the European Union that aims at providing true user-centric seamless mobility.
Objectives
Today there are many different technologies for network access, like Wireless LAN, UMTS, WiMAX, to name a few and there are many internet service providers. Currently it is difficult for the end user to use different providers / access technologies without having to manually choose the desired network. PERIMETER is working at providing a middleware that handles the inter-technology and inter-provider handover in a seamless and automatic way for the end user. In order to achieve this, different aspects have to be researched:
- Seamless handover. If one changes the access network, usually there is quite some delay until the new connection is established. Also, the IP address changes and therefore a currently used service May Be interrupted.
- Decision making. When determining which access network shall be used out of a set of available ones, different criteria has to be taken into account. Possible criteria could be user preferences (use cheap services, extend battery life, etc.), context information (location, speed, etc.), type of application which is being used (Video-stream, VoIP, download, etc.), amongst others. Based on this criteria a handover decision has to be made in order to provide the user with the best possible Quality of experience (QoE).
- Security. The user should be able to use this new form of mobility with a high degree of privacy. Privacy can even be a parameter for the decision making process. As Authentication, Authorization and Accounting (AAA protocol) provides some overhead into the handover process, fast mechanisms have to be used for AAA.
- Experimentally driven. For ensuring the practical use of the results, user testing is a central part of the research process.