Patent Application
20050100028
Mobile devices, such as mobile telephones, personal digital assistants (PDAs), and paging devices, have become ubiquitous in the world today. In our fast-paced society, we rely on such devices to give us greater flexibility in our daily lives, for business, family, and pleasure. With the proliferation of mobile network devices has come a proliferation of mobile networks.
With advances in network technologies come upgrades to networks. So, too, with different types of network communications (e.g., voice, facsimile, data), different types of network connections may exist within a particular network. Additionally, a particular mobile device may be capable of connecting to multiple networks and multiple different types of network connections within a single network. In traversing a network or networks, therefore, it is possible that a user will switch among various connections of various speeds and qualities of service and types.
Some wireless networks today permit switching between cells of the same network (e.g., from one cell to another), but the switching operation is not always transparent to the user application. It is also possible in many networks to have a multi-network mobile device (e.g., a multi-mode mobile telephone), but switching among networks is generally apparent to the end server. For example, the application and/or the server may need to address disruptions in service during switching operations. Furthermore, with, for example, IP networks, the server connection is generally re-established using a new network address, which may cause disruptions to be apparent.
Additionally, different connections within networks or in different networks may have different characteristics, for example, speed, latency, cost, or other factors or combinations of factors. As a result, not all connections may provide equivalent performance.
Preferred embodiments of the invention will now be described in connection with the associated drawings, in which:
In the following description, numerous specific details are set forth. However, it is understood that embodiments of the invention may be practiced without these specific details. In other instances, well-known circuits, structures, and/or techniques have not been shown in detail in order not to obscure an understanding of this description.
References to “one embodiment”, “an embodiment”, “example embodiment”, “various embodiments”, etc., indicate that the embodiment(s) of the invention so described may include a particular feature, structure, or characteristic, but not every embodiment necessarily includes the particular feature, structure, or characteristic. Further, repeated use of the phrase “in one embodiment” does not necessarily refer to the same embodiment, although it may.
In the following description and claims, the term “coupled,” along with its derivatives, may be used. It should be understood that “coupled” may mean that two or more elements are in direct physical or electrical contact with each other or that the two or more elements are not in direct contact but still cooperate or interact with each other.
An algorithm is here, and generally, considered to be a self-consistent sequence of acts or operations leading to a desired result. These include physical manipulations of physical quantities. Usually, though not necessarily, these quantities take the form of electrical or magnetic signals capable of being stored, transferred, combined, compared, and otherwise manipulated. It has proven convenient at times, principally for reasons of common usage, to refer to these signals as bits, values, elements, symbols, characters, terms, numbers or the like. It should be understood, however, that all of these and similar terms are to be associated with the appropriate physical quantities and are merely convenient labels applied to these quantities.
Unless specifically stated otherwise, as apparent from the following discussions, it is appreciated that throughout the specification discussions utilizing terms such as “processing,” “computing,” “calculating,” “determining,” or the like, refer to the action and/or processes of a computer or computing system, or similar electronic computing device, that manipulate and/or transform data represented as physical, such as electronic, quantities within the computing system's registers and/or memories into other data similarly represented as physical quantities within the computing system's memories, registers or other such information storage, transmission or display devices.
In a similar manner, the term “processor” may refer to any device or portion of a device that processes electronic data from registers and/or memory to transform that electronic data into other electronic data that may be stored in registers and/or memory. A “computing platform” may comprise one or more processors.
Embodiments of the present invention may include apparatuses for performing the operations herein. An apparatus may be specially constructed for the desired purposes, or it may comprise a general purpose device selectively activated or reconfigured by a program stored in the device.
Embodiments of the invention may be implemented in one or a combination of hardware, firmware, and software. Embodiments of the invention may also be implemented as instructions stored on a machine-readable medium, which may be read and executed by a computing platform to perform the operations described herein. A machine-readable medium may include any mechanism for storing or transmitting information in a form readable by a machine (e.g., a computer). For example, a machine-readable medium may include read only memory (ROM); random access memory (RAM); magnetic disk storage media; optical storage media; flash memory devices; electrical, optical, acoustical or other form of propagated signals (e.g., carrier waves, infrared signals, digital signals, etc.), and others.
For the purposes of this disclosure, and in the appended claims, unless otherwise stated, a “connection” is not used to refer to a physical layer connection; rather, it refers to connection at least at the network layer (or higher) of the Open System Interconnect (OSI) protocol model. Examples of such connections include Internet Protocol (IP) sockets, logical connections, virtual connections, and other such types of higher-level connectivity.
In order to make the change in routing appear as seamless as possible, use may be made of an intermediate device or gateway 16. The gateway may be physically connected with each of networks 12, 13, and 15, as well as with network 17, via which it may establish and maintain a connection with destination device 18. Note that network 17 may be a “trivial” network, i.e., gateway 16 and destination device 18 may be directly physically connected. Once an application running on mobile device 11 causes a connection to be established with destination device 18 via gateway 16, the connection between gateway 16 and destination device 18 may be maintained, regardless of any switching of the connection between mobile device 11 and gateway 16.
Connection management module 22, in turn, may comprise a number of components. First, connection management module 22 may include a switching module 24. Switching module 24 may perform the actual establishment of connections, possibly in concert with other components of connection management module 22.
Next, connection management module 22 may include a security module 27, which may be coupled to physical connections 21, 23 and to switching module 24. Security module 27 may deal with authentication and privacy aspects of the connections. Such functions may include, but are not limited to, encryption/decryption, login procedures, and the like.
For example, in implementing a login procedure, the switching module 24 may first establish a provisional connection with mobile device 11 via a physical connection 21. The security module 27 may then exchange information with a mobile device 11 via a physical connection 21 and determine if the mobile device 11 is permitted access. If permitted access, security module 27 may indicate this to the switching module 24, thus providing permission to establish a connection (or equivalently, to let the provisional connection remain). Note that the procedures implemented by security module 27 are not, however, limited to such login procedures and may include other login procedures or security-related functions.
The connection management module 22 may further include a connection information module 26. Connection information module 26 may provide performance-related information (and possibly other information) to a mobile device 11 via a physical connection 21. For example, when a mobile device 11 establishes a connection to gateway 16, it might be located in a particular network 12, 13, or 15 (see
The connection management module 22 may further include a load balancing module 25. Load balancing module 25 may be coupled to the physical connections 21 and/or to switching module 24 to monitor the communication traffic on each of the physical connections (i.e., on each of the networks 12, 13, 15). This information may then be furnished to the connection information module 26 and, in turn, sent to the mobile device 11, to aid the mobile device 11 in determining by which network to connect.
Load balancing module 25 may further include or interact with other modules performing other network management functions, as desired, including, for example, adaptive costing based on relative loading of a network (e.g., as the load on a particular network increases, the cost of obtaining a connection via that network may be adaptively increased in order to control further loading of that network).
Operation of the gateway 16 will now be described in connection with the flowchart of
In conjunction with the connection to mobile device 11 in Block 31, gateway 16 may further establish a connection to a desired destination device 18 in Block 32. The destination device 18 may be determined by the application running on mobile device 11.
Upon moving or otherwise determining that it is within the coverage area of another network or communications medium, mobile device 11 may seek to establish a second connection. Again, after any security procedures, the gateway 16 may establish such a connection (Block 33), if possible. While establishing the second connection, the connection between gateway 16 and destination device 18 may be maintained without interruption. In particular, the connection between gateway 16 and destination device 18 may be maintained at least for the duration of the application being run on the mobile device 11.
Upon establishment of the second connection, the mobile device 11 may then opt to drop one of the connections. This may be based on the fact that the mobile device 11 has been relocated, or it may be based on some other criterion or criteria (e.g., cost, speed, etc.), information about which may have been provided by the gateway (e.g., by the connection information module 26). After appropriate signals have been exchanged, the gateway 16 may then drop one of the connections to mobile device 11, leaving a single connection (Block 34).
Note that, in some circumstances, it may be desirable for a mobile device to maintain multiple connections simultaneously. As a result, Block 34 may be an optional procedure, which may be demanded by the particular mobile device 11, except where the mobile device moves out of the range of a particular network. In this latter case, Block 34 may be made mandatory for the connection via that network, in order to free connections for other mobile devices.
As discussed above, connections may be of many types, and the connection between the mobile device 11 and the gateway 16 need not be the same type of connection as that between the gateway 16 and the destination device 18. Such connections may include, for example, IP sockets, Signaling System 7 (SS7) connections, or other types of connections.
Some embodiments of the invention, as discussed above, may be embodied in the form of software instructions on a machine-readable medium. Such an embodiment is illustrated in
The invention has been described in detail with respect to preferred embodiments, and it will now be apparent from the foregoing to those skilled in the art that changes and modifications may be made without departing from the invention in its broader aspects. The invention, therefore, as defined in the appended claims, is intended to cover all such changes and modifications as fall within the true spirit of the invention.
