A Framework for Automatic Reconfigurations of Protocol Stacks in
Ubiquitous Computing Systems
Mahdi Niamanesh, Rasool Jalili
Department of Computer Engineering
Sharif University of Technology, Tehran, Iran
niamanesh@mehr.sharif.edu, jalili@sharif.edu
Abstract
Ubiquitous computing environment includes wireless networks, autonomic networked systems and devices with
heterogeneous standards and protocols for different contexts and situations. Autonomic networked systems require
mechanisms for automatic on-the-fly reconfigurations in their protocol stacks to be able to operate in different
situations and contexts. Automatic reconfigurations allow the system to continue its normal operation without
any need for human intervention. Since every protocol in a protocol stack has at least one peer protocol in another
system, a dynamic reconfiguration of a protocol may raise the need for a reconfiguration in the peer stack. Depending
on the reconfiguration type, the reconfiguration maybe carried out in a single or in both peer systems. For an assured
dynamic (run-time) reconfiguration of a protocol, the execution of the protocol component is stopped in a safe state,
a new protocol is initialized, and stacks switch to the new protocol at the same time. This paper proposes a protocol
stack framework to support automatic and assured reconfigurations of protocol components. Our evaluation and
performance measurement show the feasibility of automatic reconfigurations and an acceptable level of transparency
in dynamic reconfigurations.
Keywords: Protocol Stack, Automatic Reconfigurations, Dynamic Reconfiguration
1 Introduction
Ubiquitous computing environment includes wire-
less networks, autonomic networked systems and de-
vices with heterogeneous standards and protocols for
different contexts and situations [25]. The Software Ra-
dio [3, 9] and Cognitive Radio [14, 23] offer dynamic re-
configurability for protocol stacks of such systems and
devices in order to facilitate applications such as chang-
ing routing algorithms of swi