2009 International Conference on Networks Security, Wireless Communications and Trusted Computing
Wireless Network Technology and Its Applications
Ning Zhang 1, 2
1. Institute of Information Technology
Beijing Union University
Beijing, China
zn2004@163.com
2. Faculty of Information and Engineering
Flinders University, Adelaide, 5001 Australia
zhan0489@flinders.edu.au
Abstract—In this paper we analyze wireless network and
discuss the applications of wireless technology. In wireless
network, the wireless devices should be able to operate
independently of the broader Internet. In particular, there
may be times during which the connection of a wireless
device or network to the Internet is not available. During
these times, wireless devices should be able to operate stably
in modes disconnected from the rest of the infrastructure, as
well as be able to opportunistically establish "local" ad-hoc
networks using their own native protocols. This will require
that devices are capable of discovering each other without
the assistance of the broader network, as well as require that
devices use local addressing and routing schemes.
Keywords-wireless network; wireless technology; wireless
device; applications
I. INTRODUCTION
Wireless technology is becoming an integral part of our
everyday lives. Most students have a cellular phone or a
personal digital assistant (PDA) used for voice
communications, checking emails, or organizing personal
information [1]. This is the technology of the 21st century,
which has incredible opportunities and various
applications. Recent advances in networking technology
have enabled portable computing devices to link up with
servers through wireless networks, such as IEEE802.11b
and Bluetooth, to access information from them, and to
delegate heavy tasks to them [2]. A typical IEEE802.11b
wireless LAN consists of more than one base station (i.e.
access point), whose typical radio area is within at most a
few hundred meters, connected through a local area
network [3]. The data flows and interactions between
mobile users, sensors and their supporting computing
infrastructure are clearly very different from those of
today’s popular Internet applications such as email, instant
messaging or the world-wide web [4]. When a user moves
from location to location, his/her mobile computing device
may be disconnected from the current network and
reconnected to another network. Several researchers has
explored mechanisms to transparently mask variations in
mobility at the network or system level, such as Mobile-IP
and host mobility [5]. These approaches have been
designed to enable packet delivery while a mobile device
is away from its home base. Supporting these requirements
efficiently in an integrated wired-wireless global network
will require major changes [6]. Thus, the broad
978-0-7695-3610-1/09 $25.00 © 2009 IEEE
DOI 10.1109/NSWCTC.2009.255
Hong Bao
School of Information
Beijing Union University
Beijing, China
baohong@buu.com.cn
architectural challenge facing the wireless and network
research communities is that of either evolving or
redesigning the Internet architecture to efficiently
incorporate emerging wireless network elements such as
mobile terminals, ad-hoc routers and embedded sensors
and to provide end-to-end service abstractions that
facilitate application development [7]. Several protocols
and mechanisms have been developed to Support inter-
domain mobility and intra-domain mobility for multimedia
services in the Internet.
II. WIRELESS NETWORK AND ITS DEVELOPMENT
The wireless scenarios are associated with new
network service requirements that motivate a rethinking of
several Internet architecture issues. Mobile IP is the oldest
and probably the most widely known mobility
management proposal. Mobile IP consists of three major
operations: Agent discovery, Registration, and Tunneling.
Agent discovery is used to advertise the ability of mobility
agents for services on each link. Registration is for mobile
node to register with its home agent, and for mobility
agents to provide registration service. When a mobile node
is away from home, a care-of address is temporarily
assigned to the visiting mobile node, either by the foreign
agent, or by other means such as DHCP. Tunneling is
suggested for mobility agents to forward packets destined
to the mobile node to be routed correctly. Several
mobile/wireless features may require mechanisms that
cannot be implemented through the conventional IP
framework for the Internet, or if they can, may suffer from
performance degradation due to the additional overhead
associated with network protocols that were originally
designed for static infrastructure computing. Session
Initiation Protocol SIP is an application-level IETF
(Internet Engineering Task Force) open standard that
allows a host attached to a network to locate other
networked hosts and to negotiate the establishment and
termination of network connections with them. It is a
signaling protocol and does not provide for the actual
transport of information between communicating hosts.
SIP can be used for telephony, Internet conferencing,
presence, events notification and instant messaging. SIP
infrastructure can be used as the basis for creating peer-to-
peer (P2P) applications running on mobile devices. The
concept of super-networking allows many of the
complexities of the underlying network structure to be
hidden from the end-user. SIP is a cornerstone in the
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Internet version of telephony, called Voice over the
Internet Protocol (VoIP). The SIP architecture is similar to
HTTP (HyperText Transfer Protocol) and has a modular
distributed design. However, while HTTP is designed for a
client-server environment, SIP devices may act as both
servers and clients (i.e. P2P). As illustrated in Fig.1, SIP
integrates well with other layer 3 and 4 Internet standard.
SIP uses SDP (Session Description Protocol) to allow
communicating peers to negotiate session parameters.
Mobile phone is assumed to use open standard operating
systems, have IP stacks and generally have the ability to
use multiple wireless network technologies (e.g. Bluetooth,
IEEE 802.11b, UMTS, etc.). They are generally referred to
as "smart phones" because they can be programmed by the
user or supplier and can perform multiple tasks
simultaneously.
Wireless access points, so-called hotspots, are being
installed in various places, such as airports, hotels, and
cafes. While a wireless device roams among the radio cells
of the base stations within a hotspot, it can continue to
access servers provided within the hotspot as well as
global networks such as the Internet. On the other hand,
when a device moves outside of the area of the current
hotspot, it is disconnected and cannot always enter the area
of another hotspot, because the areas of hotspots are still Figure 2. Wireless technology road
sparse. Such devices must often sleep to save battery life
and avoid the risk of accidental damage while moving.
Wireless and mobile networks represent an active research III. APPLICATIONS OF WIRELESS NETWORK
and new technology development area. The rapid The wireless network should also be robust and
evolution of core radio technologies, wireless flexible enough to ensure the availability of the network in
networks/protocols and application scenarios is the presence of adversarial (intentional or otherwise)
summarized for reference in the technology roadmap given threats. In particular, wireless networks should be able to
in Fig.2 below. adapt to the presence of radio interference (jamming)
attacks. Further, defense mechanisms should be in place in
order to defend against denial-of-service (DoS) attacks
involving message flooding, such as those targeting
various network buffer resources. A well-known problem
with Mobile IP is triangular routing. Route optimization
solves this by sending binding updates to inform the
sending host about the actual location of the mobile node.
But, because of the requirements that are put on the
correspondent hosts, it cannot be expected that route
optimization will be widely employed in a near future. In
addition, there must be mechanisms in place to diagnose
and prevent individual devices from improperly following
resource management protocols (perhaps for the purpose
of achieving their own improved QoS at the expense of
other device’s degraded performance). All security
mechanisms should carefully consider the usage of device
resources, the associated performance tradeoffs, and the
latency involved in achieving security. In wireless
network, agent mobility can enable the transfer of objects
to support host mobility. If only protocol state is
transfered, agents can help to improve the efficiency of a
deployed protocol like Mobile IP. If state and code is
transfered and executed, an active networking approach to
support mobility is realized. The next generation Internet
needs to support communication with end points that are
not always connected. These disconnections can be short
or long-lived. The current approach handles disconnections
above the network layer, as in the email system. This is
Figure 1. Mobile multimedia all-IP protocol stack adequate when most devices are perpetually connected to
the Internet. With mobility, however, disconnections will

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be common. This requires a new solution to avoid every
network service implementing mechanisms or protocols to
support disconnection, which would result in a complex
mix of layers. The promise of agent technology in
telecommunications is to be a key vehicle for:1) achieving
enriched, higher level communication; 2) enabling more
intelligence in service provision and network management
e.g. by personalization and integration of different services
to value-added services and negotiation of QoS, dealing
with the enlarging amount of information and functions.
Two mobile devices should, by themselves, be able to
communicate within a next generation Internet
architecture, as should larger collections of nodes that have
local, but not global infrastructure. Fully decentralized
infrastructure will expand the architecture from a
monolithic entity to a set of principles, protocols, and
services that operate in all of the edge cases that mobility
and wireless introduce. Network elements are as shown in
figure 3.
To be able to fulfil these promises, agents need to
communicate to discover their peers, to negotiate and to
co-operate in open environments where everybody can add
their contribution when and how it is deemed appropriate.
Most importantly, agent systems will need to build on an
interface with a variety of existing and upcoming
developments and standards at the underlying network
systems level. This includes support for a wide range of
devices, but also for the integration of telecommunication,
Internet, TV and power line communication, self-
organization and software defined radio, and, particularly,
intelligent hand-over from local communication channels,
like Bluetooth, to hot-spot coverage (WLAN) and cellular
networks (UMTS and beyond). Thus, agents will only be
widely accepted if they provide a standardized, open and
generic infrastructure.
Figure 3. Wireless network elements
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The current Internet was designed for stationary
terminals, thus it does not track node location. In mobile
wireless systems with localized interaction, however, the
identities of terminals participating in the local network
change so frequently that location becomes a more natural
primitive for addressing and scoping the distribution of
computing resources relevant to a local area. This trend is
further strengthened by improvements to 802.11
localization and global positioning system receivers that
increase the availability of precise location information at
mobile terminals. Beyond location as an addressing
mechanism the architecture must enable the use of location
information for internal network optimizations at all layers
and support the development of location-aware
applications. Specific point solutions such as geographic
routing, mobile-cast, localization, or location fusion
algorithms have been described. Figure 4 shows the basic
scenario we anticipate for “beyond 3G” wireless / mobile
networks: various different mobile devices (with different
processing capabilities) are attached to an access network
which in turn interfaces to a core network.
Figure 4. Seamless network of access systems
A variety of wireline and wireless access network
technologies is used including legacy and novel cellular
technologies, wireless LAN and broadcasting technologies
like DVB-T. While the individual building blocks within
the scenario are not well defined yet, the fact of
heterogeneity of devices and network technologies is
foreseeable. Here, it is believed that agent-based active
networking could be an enabling technology for “beyond
3G” networks (covering all levels of the multi-sphere
model defined. Location information that nodes advertise
must be trustworthy and reliable, but a location service that
tracks the position of network nodes also raises significant
location privacy concerns. Location conveys a rich set of
potentially private contextual information. Even if devices
are only identified by pseudonymous addresses, an
adversary could learn the user’s identity if the location is
linkable to publicly available, identified location records.
For example, if a query originates from a car on a
suburban driveway, the likely household could be
identified by looking at a public address database. The
location architecture should incorporate privacy
mechanisms across all layers to address location privacy
concerns.
IV. CONCLUSION
Wireless, mobile and sensor networks represent an
increasingly important segment of networking research as
a whole, driven by the explosive growth of portable
computing, communication and embedded devices
connected to the Internet. Mobile agents appear to be an
interesting way to exploit synergies between current
research on network management and agent-related
research. While network management looks for new ways
to overcome the limitations of current client-server
technology, mobile agents and peer computing provide
technologies and architectures to enable de-central, peer-
to-peer communication. In future, all cell phones will be
full-fledged Internet devices, implying inevitable changes
both in applications and network infrastructure to support
mobility, location-awareness and processing/bandwidth
limitations associated with this class of end-user terminals.
Wireless technology will be a greater progress and widely
used in the world.
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ACKNOWLEDGMENT
This work is partially supported by the Scientific
Research Common Program of Beijing Municipal
Commission of Education #KM200811417011, Funding
Project for Academic Human Resources Development in
Institutions of Higher Learning Under the Jurisdiction of
Beijing Municipality, PHR (IHLB), and the Young Key
Teacher Program of Beijing Municipal Commission of
Education. Thanks for the help.
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