On the benefits of heterogeneous networking and how cellular mobile operators can help

Many research efforts in the domain of spontaneous networking are aiming at providing means to enable devices to communicate with little or no knowledge of its users about the underlying technology and its configuration. The establishment of communication channels should happen in an ad-hoc and convenient manner for the user. It should also be possible to connect at any place, at any time, with anyone using always the most appropriate radio system available. Unfortunately, the different communication technologies require often different settings and therefore a certain level of knowledge is needed to successfully connect them. This is especially true for direct node to node communication technologies like WLAN, where no centralized system is present to manage the communication setup. Several parameters have to be set before a communication can occur. When talking about secure communication the procedure gets even more complicated due to the additional key negotiation and management. Furthermore, depending on the movement of the nodes, the application that is used, the initially chosen communication technology might become suboptimal or even useless. Hence, a seamless handover to another technology would be necessary to allow to maintain the session. The first part of this paper mainly focuses on the benefit of session handovers between infrastructure based communication technologies and direct node to node communication. An implementation architecture for such a heterogeneous session management is proposed in the second part.