Moby Dick Consolidated System Integration Plan

D0103v1.doc Version 1 6.7.2003
2 Overall Moby Dick Operation
Within this chapter, a basic Moby Dick operational scenario is described. This scenario is based on the
scenario described in the Moby Dick Deliverable D0101 which was submitted in October 2001 after a
duration of 10 months.
The generic Moby Dick overall scenario starts at first with the assumption that each user is from a
contractual point of view somehow assigned to his home domain. Result of this assumption is that the
Mobility notion is not that flexible that a vagabonding user has no fixed point of attachment where he/she
can be located. Changing this assumption would be from a research point of view very interesting since it
may require e.g. significant changes in the world-wide naming service concept, but within Moby Dick a
hard mapping of a user to a valid, world-wide reachable home address is assumed. This static home
domain could be from a technical point of view a homogeneous network infrastructure based on
exclusively on network technology, or a heterogeneous network infrastructure comprising network
segments of different technologies. In the latter, the network technologies are restricted to Ethernet
according to 802.3 standard, a wireless LAN (802.11), and/or a Moby Dick specific TD-CDMA.
Furthermore, each domain consists of at least one IP subnet. Each IP subnet corresponds to one lower
layer network access cell which can be either one of the three above mentioned layer 2 technologies.
Based on this key assumption the whole and overall Moby Dick scenario is build on. On top of this fixed
home domain, it is further assumed that a user has a contract with the provider of the home network or
home domain. This provider maintains an AAA entity (which is in the whole project called AAAC.h)
which is further responsible for validating and verifying any credentials pertinent to the user. This kind of
authority can be either located at the user premises or at any other location within the domain of the home
network provider. Contract details of the contract between user and provider are agreed based on a
Service Level Agreement (SLA) which is transformed into a User Profile which is stored on the AAAC.h.
entity, or, being more precise, in a database where this AAAC.h entity has secured and exclusive access.
Content of this profile is next to others, roaming permissions, QoS parameters and any further
information which is required to provide a user with the capability to roam around – within and between
administrative domains. Such a roaming user – or Mobile User - is allowed to connect itself using any
mobile device in any location to the network. The provider of the foreign network (foreign means here
that the use has no direct contract with the network the user wants to use) provides the user with network
resources/service according to the SLA reflected in the profile of the home domain only, if there exists a
contractual relationship between these two administrative domains. Here it might be the case that no
roaming agreement exists between the provider of the home domain and the provider of the foreign
domain (of course this is part of the profile) and in this case no service is delivered to the mobile user is
provided.
A user is allowed to move around and the required hand-over procedures enable the user to maintain any
existing connection while moving is based on the agreed SLA with the provider of the home network.
Furthermore, within Moby Dick, service consumption is metered to support the post-paid charging
scheme and registration and service requests are logged to perform auditing.
In the following, based on the above described high level scenarios, some more technology-specific
considerations are summarised.
Within a framework that integrates mobility, AAA, and QoS in heterogeneous networks, a wide range of
ways in which the user perceives the “network” is possible. Obviously, some assumptions need to be
made about how the Moby Dick network will be used as an aid to make design decisions. From a wide
range of possible scenarios, we need to concentrate on a few to optimise the effort and therefore the cost
of the network and the associated functions.
The Moby Dick service provisioning process is user specific, this means that there is a decoupling from a
user and an end-system foreseen. This de-coupling is done via the user profile. So the service
provis ioning process is user-centric.
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