The future Generalized Access Network has a common infrastructure supporting multiple radio interface technologies through which mobile hosts; mobile ad-hoc, PN (Personal Networks), PAN (Personal Area Networks), MAN (Metropolitan Area Networks), and moving networks (Mobile Networks) will be attached. The edge of the wired infrastructure is denoted as the Edge Device (ED) and the wireless edge as WED. The WED is a combined device with air-interface functionality (e.g. base-stations and Access points) together with edge-router function. The air-interface for WED could be any (e.g., WLAN, 3G-radio and 4G-radio) novel radio technology.
Such a GAN requires new mobility aware protocols for signaling information, (e.g., QoS, AAA) about a data flow along its path in the network. The IETF Next Steps in Signaling (NSIS) working group is considering such protocols and provides a model for the network entities that take part in such signaling and the relationship between signaling and the rest of the network operation. The NSIS overall protocol suite is decomposed into a generic (lower) layer denoted as NSIS Transport Layer Protocol (NTLP), with a separate upper layer for each signaling application denoted as NSIS Signaling Layer Protocol (NSLP).
The NTLP protocol layer is currently standardized in the IETF NSIS working group, see: http://www.ietf.org/html.charters/nsis-charter.html.
The NTLP protocol functionality is essentially just efficient upstream and downstream peer-peer message delivery, in a wide variety of message scenarios. Message delivery includes features such as locating and/or selecting which NTLP peer to carry out signaling exchanges for a specific data flow. A concrete solution for the NTLP is specified in NSIS as the General Internet Messaging Protocol for Signaling (GIMPS).
The main goal of this assignment is to design and implement the General Internet Messaging Protocol for Signaling (GIMPS). One of the starting points that could be used during the realization of this assignment is the RMD-RSVP protocol implementation described in the M.Sc. thesis of Patrick Goering published by the University of Twente. And the RMD is the abbreviation of Resource Management in Diffserv and RSVP is the abbreviation of Resource reSerVation Protocol. Another starting point that could be used during the realization of this assignment is the Linux implementation of the Cross-Application Signaling Protocol (CASP) protocol, see:
http://user.informatik.uni-goettingen.de/~casp/
