Connectivité contextuelle dans une architecture multi-accès
Siwar Ben Hadj Said · HAL (Le Centre pour la Communication Scientifique Directe) · 2014
Managing the network connectivity in multi-access architectures becomes a critical issue as these architectures should be able to interwork between heterogeneous technologies and to face the new ecosystem challenges. The 3GPP standards body proposed the multi-access 3GPP system that aims at providing ubiquitous network connectivity. This proposal has many benefits but it brings also a lot of challenges for network operators. In fact, within this system, network mechanisms such as mobility management and security mechanisms are designed to be activated in a systematic manner leading to rising network operating costs. For instance, the location update mechanism is always performed even for static devices. However, network operators face the challenge to host several categories of subscribers such as static subscribers, subscribers with high mobility, subscribers requiring high security level, subscribers satisfied with just low security level, subscribers requiring high/low bandwidth, etc. This thesis includes three main contributions. In the first contribution, we analyze the current approaches in multi-access 3GPP system. The aim of such a study is to analyze whether the current network connectivity management approaches could face the challenges imposed by the new ecosystem. To do that, we decompose the network connectivity into several network services. Particularly, our work addresses the mobility and security services. Through network usage scenarios, we showed that security and mobility mechanisms in the access network can be bypassed in certain cases. In addition, we specified a number of requirements for the connectivity management I future network architectures. In the second contribution, we concentrate on proposing a Context-Aware Connectivity Management (CACM) module for multi-access architectures. This module is able to manage and interwork between heterogeneous accesses technologies in an efficient manner. It selects and activates network mechanisms in accordance with the contextual information. In the third contribution, we propose two concrete applications of the proposed model: (i) adaptive data traffic protection service and (ii) adaptive session continuity service. For the first, we setup a test bed that reproduces the untrusted non-3GPP access in which we implemented a mechanism that activates/deactivates the encryption and integrity protection mechanisms within the IPsec tunnel according to the flow requirements. For the second application, we proposed an OpenFlow-based control plane for the LTE/EPC architecture to ensure adaptive session continuity service.