mocca

Ad hoc networks play an important role in various scenarios. One typical field is road telematics, where a groups of vehicles are organized in inter-vehicle communication ad hoc networks to exchange information locally. In this scenario, Internet Gateways couple the inter-vehicle communication network with the Internet. The basic task of the Internet integration is to provide communication protocols to "inter-connect" these inter-vehicle communication networks seamlessly with the Internet, so that the inter-vehicle communication network becomes part of the Internet.

mocca "summarizes" my current research activities on the Internet integration of inter-vehicle communication networks. mocca is an abbreviation for "mobile communication architecture". The key concept of mocca is a proxy-based communication architecture, which uses a proxy to interconnect the ad hoc network and the Internet. Thereby, mocca handles the following requirements:

IPv4/IPv6 support: Since inter-vehicle communication networks may likely comprise a lot of vehicles, we consequently support IPv6 within the ad hoc network.
Mobility Support: In order to support the devices' mobility, we use an adapted Mobile IPv6 (called MMIP6)
Service Discovery: In order to detect Internet Gateways, we developed DRIVE (DiscoveRy of Internet gateways from VEhicles), which is able to identify such gateways to the Internet efficiently. DRIVE is a very basic prerequisite for MMIP6, as the usual identification of access routers in Mobile IPv6 does not work in ad hoc networks.
Transport Layer Protocols: As the proxy separates the end-to-end connection, we are able to deploy optimized transport layer protocols within the ad hoc network.

Details of this project mocca can be found on my publications' site. Further results and details will appear at this site ASAP :-).

FYI: Any resemblance to the well-known mocha (or the German "Mokka") is not purely coincidental: Mocha is a type of (strong) coffee; its beans are tiny but of high quality. This definition clearly shows the relation with mocca: We are a "tiny" group and a lot of (strong) coffee was needed for the contribution of this high quality project :-) [Note that this type of coffee originally came from Mocha, a city in Jemen close to the Red Sea].