A New Perspective on Mobility Management Scenarios and Approaches (original) (raw)

A characterization of mobility management in user-centric networks

InProc. 11th international conference on Next Generation Wired/Wireless Advanced Networking (New2AN 2011), Smart Spaces and Next Generation Wired/Wireless Networking Lecture Notes in Computer Science Volume 6869, 2011, pp 314-325, 2011

Mobility management is a key aspect to consider in future Internet architectures, as these architectures include a highly nomadic end-user which often relies on services provided by multi-access networks. In contrast, today’s mobility management solutions were designed having in mind simpler scenarios and requirements from the network and where roaming could often be taken care of with previously established agreements. With a more dynamic behavior in the network, and also with a more prominent role from the end-user, mobility management has to deal with additional requirements derived from new Internet paradigms. To assist in understanding such requirements and also how to deal with them, this paper proposes a starting point to dismantle current mobility management notions. Our contribution is an initial proposal on defining mobility management in concrete functional blocks, their interaction, as well as a potential grouping which later can assist in deriving novel and more flexible mobility management architectures.

User-centric mobility management for multimedia content access

Multimedia Tools and Applications, 2011

Current mobility protocols and architectures are mainly targeted to devices or applications and they usually lack the ability to support user-centric paradigms; moreover, they usually face a single aspect of the problem, i.e., terminal handover or session mobility. Full mobility support is only available to specific applications or protocols (e.g., SIP) but these approaches do not exploit all facilities for movement detection at the network/link layers and do not allow to use the same framework for different applications. This paper proposes a generic mobility framework for terminal handover and session migration. It pursues the user-centric paradigm and builds a cross-layer architecture, yielding to a high level of generality, applicability and flexibility. Unlike other approaches, it does not require any modification in correspondent peers and works with a minimal network infrastructure. Software implementations are described for two representative real-time multimedia applications, i.e., media streaming and interactive conference. The effectiveness of the framework was analyzed by means of both performance measurements in local and Internet testbeds and user evaluation during a live demo conducted at a national science exhibition.

PERIMETER: A user-centric mobility framework

2010

This demo shows a prototype of a user-centric mobility framework that provides handover for macro-mobility on handheld devices. The framework is designed for mobile-controlled handover and does not require modification of the Internet infrastructure. The end-users are so able to control the roaming process governed by user considerations in addition to business objectives. To achieve seamless mobility UDP tunneling is used as a basis for the handover process. Additionally, measurements are performed on the tunnels to acquire Quality of Service (QoS) metrics and hence serve for roaming decision making processes.

The Challenges and Compatibility of Mobility Management Solutions for Future Networks

Applied Sciences

Wireless network devices can attain the required level of quality of service (QoS) and maintain connectivity even after detaching from a current point of access. This detachment (mobility) requires various mobility management (MM) mechanisms, which present numerous challenges due to the exponential growth of wireless devices and the demands of users. The network must be heterogeneous and dense to manage such a heightened escalation of network traffic, increased number of devices, and different types of user demands. Such factors will seriously challenge MM solutions, eventually making the networks non-feasible from the dependability, adaptability, extensibility, and power consumption points of view. Therefore, novel perspectives on MM mechanisms are desired for 5G networks and beyond. This paper introduces an innovative discussion of the functional requirements of MM mechanisms for advanced wireless networks. We present comprehensive arguments on whether the prevailing mechanisms pe...

Distributed and Dynamic Mobility Management in Mobile Internet: Current Approaches and Issues

Journal of Communications, 2011

Cellular networks have been hierarchical so that mobility management have primarily been deployed in a centralized architecture. More flattened network architecture for the mobile Internet is anticipated to meet the needs of rapidly increasing traffic from the mobile users and to reduce cost in the core network. Distributing the mobility management functions as opposed to centralizing them at the root of the network hierarchy is more compatible with a flat network architecture. Mobility management may be distributed at different levels: core level, access router level, access level, and host level. It may also be partially distributed or fully distributed. A distributed mobility management architecture avoids unnecessarily long routes, is more scalable with the increasing number of mobile users, and is a convenient platform for dynamic mobility management which means providing mobility support to mobile users only when they need the support. Dynamic mobility management can avoid waste of resources and also reduce signaling overhead and network cost. The desired distributed and dynamic mobility management needs to solve existing problems, meet the needs of changes in traffic and network architecture, and be simple and inexpensive to deploy. This paper surveys existing mobility management solutions in mobile Internet, explains the limitations of a centralized mobility management approach, and discusses potential approaches of distributing mobility management functions. The issues and challenges in the design of distributed and dynamic mobility management are also described.

Mobility Management in Mobile Computing and Networking Environments

Wireless Information Highways

This chapter analyzes and proposes some mobility management models and schemes by taking into account their capability to reduce search and location update costs in wireless mobile networks. The first model proposed is called the built-in memory model; it is based on the architecture of the IS-41 network and aims at reducing the home-location-register (HLR) access overhead. The performance of this model was investigated by comparing it with the IS-41 scheme for different call-to-mobility ratios (CMRs). Experimental results indicate that the proposed model is potentially beneficial for large classes of users and can yield substantial reductions in total user-location management costs, particularly for users who have a low CMR. These results also show that the cost reduction obtained on the location update is very significant while the extra costs paid to locate a mobile unit simply amount to the costs of crossing a single pointer between two location areas. The built-in memory model ...

Towards an architecture for mobility management and resource control

2008

In 4G networks, various wireless access technologies will be integrated into a heterogeneous network based on an IP core network infrastructure. Thus, numerous works focus on mobility and vertical handover management to allow multipleinterfaces mobile terminals to roam seamlessly between these access networks. The different handoff schemes can be classified into three approaches according to where the decision to handoff is made: within the terminal, the network or thanks to a collaboration between them. However, these approaches still present some drawbacks; namely the problem of ressource management whenever the handover is controlled by the mobile terminal (MT) and the problem of scalability and complexity whenever the handover is rather decided by the network. In this paper, we propose a new approach that explicitly takes into account management requirements, the current ressource usage and user preferences. Furthermore, our solution provides means to select the "best-suited" network for each application according to its expectations in terms of QoS. A feasibility study of our solution is then conducted on a single mobile terminal by using typical scenarios and applying various algorithms to evaluate their behaviors.

The CASPER Project Approach Towards User-Centric Mobile Networks

2019 22nd Euromicro Conference on Digital System Design (DSD)

This paper presents an overview of the project CASPER 1 , a Marie Curie Research and Innovation Staff Exchange (RISE) project running from 2016 until 2020. The main objective of CASPER is to combine academic and industrial forces towards leveraging the expected benefits of Quality of Experience (QoE) exploitation in future digital networks. In particular, CASPER exploits the most recent advances in communication networks, such as the Software Defined Networking (SDN) and the Network Functions Virtualisation (NFV) in order to design and implement a middleware architecture for QoE-driven service provisioning. CASPER, therefore, addresses the challenges that mobile network operators and service providers face in the current fully digitalized era of communications, concerning the need to provide customer-oriented, reliable, efficient, flexible and dynamic service management.

An architecture for seamless mobility management in various types of …

In the future, mobile users will have the possibility to use a variety of wireless access networks simultaneously making the vision "Always best connected" come true. The Internet Protocol (IP) will most likely be the least common divisor allowing service providers to deploy services in a unified way regardless of access network type (being wired or wireless). The 3GPP-led development of the IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) is a promising step towards the vision. However, there are a number of obstacles along this way forward. Various deployment difficulties related to already installed base of user and infrastructure equipment and service providers protecting their old investments are the most common obstacles. In addition to those reasons, somewhat conservative regulatory authorities, shortcomings in digital rights management, multiple standardization bodies proposing non-aligned solutions, as well as non-uniformed and non-optimized use of radio spectrum do not improve the speed of change.