Mobile Wireless Office

Abstract

This project was established based on the Mobile VPN developments performed within the Anaisoft project. The resulting concept called Secure Mobile IP (SecMIP) has been implemented on Linux and installed at a laboratory and demonstration environment at Swisscom. This prototype implementation demonstrates the feasibility of the SecMIP (or "Mobile Office") concept. The longer-term vision of the resulting Mobile Office project is on secure roaming between different access network technologies. In an example scenario, a business traveller is connected to the Intranet while his train arrives in the airport. In this hot spot area of the airport there is a powerful wireless infrastructure deployed such as GPRS or IEEE Wireless LAN (WLAN). The traveller gets connectivity to this broadband infrastructure without being forced to reconnect on the new network and loosing his Intranet session. The SecMIP concept has been extended to fit the needs in heterogeneous networks. Support of GPRS, WLAN and Ethernet has been designed and implemented. In addition, an interface was implemented to make an automated decision, which access technology should be used by the software. In collaboration with an external software company Swisscom has transferred the SecMIP concept to Windows platforms. A prototype version of the SecMIP client software was demonstrated. Future activities focus on the evaluation and integration of other access technologies. Considering the growing research activities in ad-hoc networking, technologies such as Bluetooth and security issues in mobile ad-hoc networks will be of special interest.

Project Details