Lightweight Mechanisms for Self-configuring Protocols

In next generation networks, the introduction of intelligence and flexibility in mobile devices and network nodes appears as a promising solution to the high degree of variability in the telecommunication environment. The materialization of these concepts under the autonomic networking notion paves the way for introduction of awareness and adaptation capabilities in various layers of mobile devices, also including the protocol stack. In this paper we investigate the problem of dynamic protocol stack adaptation and propose enabling mechanisms for the dynamic binding and replacement of their constituent components. Our work addresses the challenge of the application feasibility and performance evaluation of these concepts by quantifying the introduced delay. The obtained results show that the introduced protocol adaptation functionalities pose negligible performance impact in the system. Our work reveals that although flexibility and performance stand on the opposite sides of the system balance, the introduction of transparent mechanisms leads to great adaptability with minimum performance impact.