MINA: A reflective middleware for managing dynamic multinetwork environments

The networking landscape of today is characterized by diverse access technologies including cellular, WiFi, Ethernet, MANETs, and ZigBee, and properly managing this heterogeneous networking infrastructure is a key challenge to take full advantage of its many opportunities. In this paper, we propose MINA (Multinetwork INformation Architecture), a reflective (self-observing and adapting) middleware approach to realize and manage dynamic and heterogeneous multi-networks in pervasive environments. A novel aspect of MINA is that it embodies an Observe-Analyze-Adapt (OAA) loop to i) achieve a reasonably accurate, centralized global view of the multi-network through the design of novel techniques for overlay structuring, network state collection and formal methods-based analysis, and ii) take advantage of the global view for adapting multi-network structure by reallocating application flows across networks and proactively planning and deploying additional network resources.