Exploiting DHT functionalities for pervasive network mobility

The rapid diffusion of wireless technologies for network access has fostered the expectation for enhanced forms of communication in the current and future Internet. To this aim, there is a large consent about pursuing user-centric and pervasive paradigms; that requires an integrated and uniform approach to mobility management, taking into account all the different aspects of this issue. However, current mobility protocols exhibit important limitations and drawbacks. Starting from these considerations, this paper sketches a mobility framework based on overlay infrastructures; we describe the main features it should exhibit and then we focus on the problem of keeping track of mobile node's location inside the network. We discuss the work done so far, which was addressed to compare and assess different DHT schemes for the above framework. ©2010 IEEE.