The Hindu Business Line : Nomadicity isn't the same as mobility

IF you can rise above e-mail and Web surfing, Stefan Raab and Madhavi W. Chandra will put you into an ambulance to expose you to a real-world application that their new book Mobile IP Technology and Applications, from Cisco (www.ciscopress.com) describes.

It's not the old vehicle with only voice radios, but "one that has real-time high-speed voice, video, and data", to significantly improve the level of care that can be offered to a patient, as the authors emphasise. Thus, the on-scene paramedics can have access to medical records and hospital staff, and the hospital can be ready when the patient arrives because all the data can be transmitted en route, state the authors.

Ambulance has its root in Latin ambulare, to walk, an early form of mobility even when we were nomads. But, do you know that mobility is different from nomadicity?

"The latter refers to the ability to move from one location to another and start communications. Nomadicity can best be described by the laptop user who moves from one location to another, plugs in the laptop, obtains an Internet connection, and starts communicating. The user, however, will need to terminate and restart sessions and applications as a result of the move."

Know that the user is nomadic when it is he who is responsible for establishing a connection wherever he goes. The goal of the book is "to facilitate a device that is always connected through the best available link". The ultimate goal, therefore, is to maintain communications across access link changes, explain Stefan and Madhavi. And this means four requirements are addressed, viz. "location discovery, move detection, update signalling, and path (re) establishment."

Mobile IP is the technology to achieve the mobility that the authors aim at. It is "a dynamic routing protocol where end devices signal their own routing updates and dynamic tunnels eliminate the need for host route propagation." The dynamism part is to alter routing tables as routes change, by detecting network topology changes and choosing the best available paths. Since mobile nodes attach and detach rapidly, it becomes necessary for the end device to inform the network "of the best path through which it should be reached".

Tunnels are logical links, you'd learn; and that "tunnelling usually connects two similar networks through a dissimilar network." As you wander through the well laid-out book, you can pick up more terms such as: Home Address is mobile node's IP address; CoA is care-of address, the logical location of the mobile node in a foreign domain to which encapsulated (tunnelled) traffic from the Home Agent is delivered; and Lifetime, the maximum lifetime that the Mobility Agent can support a Mobile IP registration. In a chapter on security, the authors remind you that the Mobile Node cannot have a security relationship with every FA to which it can roam.

Campus mobility is not about the freedom to wander in the campus, but "mobility within a single administrative domain," such as university, hospital, or hotel conference halls. For authentication, authorisation and accounting there is the AAA server; it manages the security keys. From campus, graduate to metro mobility, which is relevant to delivery personnel, service workers, and public safety officers. "Imagine how productivity would increase if employees could access just-in-time training, real-time work order systems, procurement systems, and other job-related systems while on the go."

A book you can take places!

A foreign policy of information space

GOVERNMENTS are obsessed with the power of information, "both as an attribute of domination and wealth creation in times of peace and as a weapon in times of war," writes Monroe E. Price in "Media and Sovereignty," from The MIT Press (http://mitpress.mit.edu). "The world is engaged in a vast remapping of the relationship of the state to images, messages, and information within its boundaries," elaborates the author about the changes happening to the media space. For instance, "in the 1990s, the US ambassador to India attempted, on behalf of US business interests, to discourage Indian broadcast reform legislation that would severely restrict US foreign investment or ownership in the sector," informs the book.

Another `constellation of change' that Monroe notices is "the steady effort to extend access to media and telephony to areas where the basic infrastructure of modernity is not yet in place but there is a rising and potentially large middle class," as in India. Dangerously, while discussing remapping in China, the author notes that technologies widely thought to be inherently democratic are often programmed, designed, and built (whether successfully or not) to maintain lines of strong authority.

Any philosophical discussion uses metaphors as "necessary tools for taking what appears to be chaos and providing some comfort, some semblance of pattern." For the Internet, a standard metaphor has been `highway'. Monroe writes that in the Net's first decade, "the metaphor led to an idea of impersonality of information, streaming nameless data, like anonymous automobiles and trucks, subject to little in the way of interference and channelling." We now know that "every car, every truck, is identified, and traceable."

Turn the globe to locate the Kingdom of Tonga - because it has been "a dramatic actor in the process of acquiring orbital slots", informs Monroe. When in 1976, Tonga, along with other equatorial states asserted that equatorial nations ought to have preferred access, almost by natural law, to the geostationary orbit in outer space above, "the industrialised West disagreed, arguing that outer space was a kind of public domain." This is a story you'd find interesting to trace on the ITU's chronicles.

There is a chapter on `illegal and harmful content' that explains how the two words illegal and harmful have gained a secondary meaning - "an association with pornography or similar material harmful to minors." Monroe draws attention to other illegalities such as: "terrorist communication, hate speech, heightened violence, computer hacking, fraudulent advertising, copyright violations," and perhaps tobacco too.

"It is a problem to develop programming for a transnational audience if there is the danger of prosecution in India for one kind of programming and in Malaysia or China for another," says the author. "Inconsistency in the law of standards leads to lower investment in programming, more caution, and less diversity."

How I wish I told you more about Monroe's work: such as `the haunting question' of whether technology overwhelms law and the capacity of the state to regulate, or the arguments for `a foreign policy of information space'.

Useful read.

Tailpiece

"Our chief has already implemented the tobacco ban!"

"He stopped smoking?"

"And also removed T, O, A, B and C from all keyboards!"

Books2Byte@TheHindu.co.in

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