A NEAT Approach to Mobile Communication

Abstract

The demands for mobile communication is ever increasing. Mobile applications are increasing both in numbers and in heterogeneity of their requirements, and an increasingly diverse set of mobile technologies are employed. This creates an urgent need for optimizing end-to-end services based on application requirements, conditions in the network and available transport solutions; something which is very hard to achieve with today's internet architecture. In this paper, we introduce the NEAT transport architecture as a solution to this problem. NEAT is designed to offer a flexible and evolvable transport system, where applications communicate their transport-service requirements to the NEAT system in a generic, transport-protocol independent way. The best transport option is then configured at run-time based on application requirements, network conditions, and available transport options. Through a set of real life mobile use case experiments, we demonstrate how applications with different properties and requirements could employ the NEAT system in multi-access environments, showing significant performance benefits as a result.