Course Overview

This course examines how mobility affects networks, systems and applications. Mobility of devices and end-users has behavioral implications at all layers of the Internet protocol stack, from the MAC layer up through the application layer. Handling mobility efficiently requires more information sharing between network layers than is typically considered. We will look at how mobility affects the layers of the protocol stack as well as how it affects different functional aspects of systems, including security, privacy, file systems, resource discovery, resource management (including energy usage), personal on-line identities, and other areas. We will investigate emerging applications enabled by mobility. The networks we study will include “traditional” wireless networks, in which an underlying infrastructure is assumed, as well as ad hoc mobile wireless networks, in which nodes may come and go and must form their own network infrastructure on the fly.