A framework for seamless roaming across cellular and wireless local area networks

In the future, wireless and mobile users will have increased demands for seamless roaming across different types of wireless networks, quality of service guarantees, and support for a variety of services. This awareness has led to research activities directed toward intersystem and global roaming, and can be noticed in numerous products like multimode handsets, interworking gateways, and ongoing standards and research work on intersystem roaming. The authors of this article proposed a global mobility management framework to support seamless roaming across heterogeneous wireless networks. In this article we provide details on the use of the framework to support roaming across cellular and wireless local area networks. Highlights of the framework include a robust architecture for mobility management for varying user mobility spans, provisioning for QoS mapping, intersystem message translation, and mechanisms in the WLAN to support user-subscribed services. Performance aspects related to handoff delays, data redirection, and processing overheads are presented and discussed. Performance comparison of intersystem roaming between cellular and WLAN with and without the framework is presented.     

A dynamic location management scheme for next-generation multitierPCS systems

Global wireless networks enable mobile users to communicate regardless of their locations. One of the most important issues is location management in a highly dynamic environment because mobile users may roam between different wireless systems, network operators, and geographical regions. A location-tracking mechanism is introduced that consists of intersystem location updates and intersystem paging. Intersystem update is implemented by using the concept of boundary location area, which is determined by a dynamic location update policy in which the velocity and the quality of service are taken into account on a per-user basis. Also, intersystem paging is based on the concept of a boundary location register, which is used to maintain the records of mobile users crossing the boundary of systems. This mechanism not only reduces location-tracking costs, but also significantly decreases call-loss rates and average-paging delays. The performance evaluation of the proposed schemes is provided to demonstrate their effectiveness in multitier personal communication systems     

Dynamic guard channel allocation scheme for calls in WONs

Future wireless networks will provide ubiquitous communication services to a large number of mobile users. The design of such networks is based on heterogeneous wireless overlay networks that allow efficient use of the limited available spectrum, and also cover different ranges of coverage areas. A dynamic guard channel allocation scheme for calls in wireless overlay networks is developed. The new scheme considers the mobility, current location of mobile terminals, and bandwidth status in allocating bandwidth for new calls in order to guarantee the quality of service for all calls     

A new signaling protocol for intersystem roaming in next-generationwireless systems

In next-generation wireless systems, one of the major features that is different from the current personal communication service systems is the seamless global roaming. The mobile subscribers will be allowed to move freely across different networks while maintaining their quality of service for a variety of applications. To meet this demand, the signaling protocol of mobility management must be designed, supporting location registration and call delivery for roaming users who move beyond their home network. A new signaling protocol is proposed, emphasizing the active location registration for ongoing services during the mobile subscribers' movement. Another important goal of this new protocol is to reduce the overhead caused by mobility management so that the signaling traffic load and consumption of network resources can be reduced. The new protocol efficiently reduces the latency of call delivery and call loss rate due to crossing wireless systems with different standards or signaling protocols. The numerical results reveal that the proposed protocol is effective in improving the overall system performance     

LTE移动性管理研究

无线网络中的移动性是指对终端位置的改变而保证持续接入服务,并保持与之通信的能力。移动性管理就是为用户和终端提供相应的功能以保证异构网络的漫游和服务的无缝移动,并使用户与网络的联系达到最佳状态。针对未来数据业务具有高速、突发性的特点,LTE核心网发生了很大的变化,主要是采取了扁平化结构。在这种系统架构下怎样为用户提供更好的服务,LTE移动性管理成为目前该领域研究工作的重点。     

A Simple and Robust Vertical Handoff Algorithm for Heterogeneous Wireless Mobile Networks

Wireless networking is becoming an increasingly important and popular way of providing global information access to users on the move. One of the main challenges for seamless mobility is the availability of simple and robust vertical handoff algorithms, which allow a mobile node to roam among heterogeneous wireless networks. In this paper, motivated by the facts that vertical handoff procedure is done on mobile nodes and battery power may be one crucial parameter for certain mobile nodes, a simple and robust two-step vertical handoff decision algorithm is proposed for heterogeneous wireless mobile networks. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first vertical handoff algorithm that takes the classification of mobile nodes into consideration, one is resource-poor mobile nodes, and the other is resource-rich mobile nodes. This new feature makes it more applicable in the real world. In addition, dynamic new call blocking probability is firstly introduced by this paper to make handoff decision for wireless networks. The experiment results have shown that the proposed algorithm outperforms traditional algorithms in bandwidth utilization, handoff dropping rate and handoff rate.     

Dynamic hierarchical mobility management strategy for mobile IP networks

One of the major challenges for the wireless network design is the efficient mobility management, which can be addressed globally (macromobility) and locally (micromobility). Mobile Internet protocol (IP) is a commonly accepted standard to address global mobility of mobile hosts (MHs). It requires the MHs to register with the home agents (HAs) whenever their care-of addresses change. However, such registrations may cause excessive signaling traffic and long service delay. To solve this problem, the hierarchical mobile IP (HMIP) protocol was proposed to employ the hierarchy of foreign agents (FAs) and the gateway FAs (GFAs) to localize registration operations. However, the system performance is critically affected by the selection of GFAs and their reliability. In this paper, we introduce a novel dynamic hierarchical mobility management strategy for mobile IP networks, in which different hierarchies are dynamically set up for different users and the signaling burden is evenly distributed among the network. To justify the effectiveness of our proposed scheme, we develop an analytical model to evaluate the signaling cost. Our performance analysis shows that the proposed dynamic hierarchical mobility management strategy can significantly reduce the system signaling cost under various scenarios and the system robustness is greatly enhanced. Our analysis also shows that the new scheme can outperform the Internet Engineering Task Force mobile IP hierarchical registration scheme in terms of the overall signaling cost. The more important contribution is the novel analytical approach in evaluating the performance of mobile IP networks.     

QoS provision in wireless access networks: a routing perspective considering mobility

Future wireless communications are expected to provide mobile users access to the desired service with the appropriate quality at any place. The essential elements for assembling such a vision are mobility, quality of service (QoS) provision and scalability, which are expected to be merged into the design process of wireless access networks. Internet mobility support is currently entering a mature phase in which scalable solutions provide low loss or even seamless handovers in cellular and heterogeneous mobile environments. Wireless and mobile QoS architectures extend the equivalent Internet approaches in order to accommodate the requirements associated with the presence of wireless links and mobility. Nevertheless, none of the popular mobility proposals combined with wireless and mobile QoS architectures encounter QoS in the routing function, leaving the QoS provision underutilized. QoS routing (QoSR) complements existing QoS architectures, enhancing application performance especially in the case of congestion, while providing efficient resource management. However, QoSR was originally designed for fixed IP networks without taking mobility into account. This paper investigates the interaction of QoSR in wireless access networks, identifying key points for the efficient cooperation with mobility and existing QoS architectures. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Mobility support across hybrid IP-based wireless environment: review of concepts, solutions, and related issues

The 4G or Beyond 3G wireless networks is consist of IP-based heterogeneous access networks from 3G cellular, WiFi, WiMAX to other emerging access technologies such as mesh networks. The key objective of designing the next generation wireless networks is to support of mobile subscribers. To support the mobile host in the hybrid wireless access technologies, many solutions based on network protocol stack have been proposed in the literature. In this article, after review of mobility concepts, a special attention is given to some of the mobility management methods as well as handover techniques across various wireless access networks. We have also compared the major mobility protocols in each layer for their features. Finally, some of the open issues that needed to be addressed in mobility management protocol in the next generation wireless networks are outlined.     

SIP-based vertical handoff between WWANs and WLANs

Future-generation wireless networks have been envisioned as the integration of various wireless access networks, including both wireless wide area networks and wireless local area networks. In such a heterogeneous network environment, seamless mobility support is the basis of providing uninterrupted wireless services to mobile users roaming between various wireless access networks. Because of transparency to lower-layer characteristics, ease of deployment, and greater scalability, the application-layer-based session initiation protocol has been considered the right candidate for handling mobility in heterogeneous wireless networks. However, SIP entails application-layer transport and processing of messages, which may introduce considerable delay. As a case study of the performance of mobility management protocols in the heterogeneous wireless networks, we analyze the delay associated with vertical handoff using SIP in the WLAN-UMTS internetwork. Analytical results show that WLAN-to-UMTS handoff incurs unacceptable delay for supporting real-time multimedia services, and is mainly due to transmission of SIP signaling messages over erroneous and bandwidth-limited wireless links. On the other hand, UMTS-to-WLAN handoff experiences much less delay, mainly contributed by the processing delay of signaling messages at the WLAN gateways and servers. While the former case requires the deployment of soft handoff techniques to reduce the delay, faster servers and more efficient host configuration mechanisms can do the job in the latter case.     

Fast-Handover Mechanism between 802.11 WLAN and 802.16 WiMax with MIH in PMIPv6

As the wireless Internet services become widely available, users become able to use various Internet services without restriction in location. In particular, the demands on wireless Internet services are becoming greater, because mobile devices that support high mobility are getting smarter. However, if a user uses various wireless networks, much limitation occurs in network setting when they move a network different each other. This is because there are few appropriate handover mechanisms to support a heterogeneous network. We propose a fast-handover for heterogeneous networks that utilizes MIH in PMIPv6 to support heterogeneous networks and to reduce the handover latency time. And the performance evaluation for the proposed method was done separately for low speed and high speed mobility. The result presented shows that the suggested method has reduced latency time by 26 % and packet losses by 90 % (Avg.).     

Global roaming in next-generation networks

Next-generation mobile/wireless networks are already under preliminary deployment. Mobile/wireless all-IP networks are expected to provide a substantially wider and enhanced range of services. However, an evolutionary rather than revolutionary approach to the deployment of a global all-IP wireless/mobile network is expected. To support global roaming, next-generation networks will require the integration and interoperation of mobility management processes under a worldwide wireless communications infrastructure. In this article global roaming is addressed as one of the main issues of next-generation mobile networks. Apart from the physical layer connectivity and radio spectrum allocation plans, mobility in a hierarchical structured scheme is discussed. An all-IP wireless/mobile network combined with inherited mobility schemes of each network layer and Mobile IP extensions is proposed. In this respect the mobility management mechanisms in WLAN, cellular, and satellite networks are analyzed, and an all-IP architecture is described and an enhanced roaming scenario presented     

Agent-Based Forwarding Strategies for Reducing Location Management Cost in Mobile Networks

An important issue in location management for dealing with user mobility in wireless networks is to reduce the cost associated with location updates and searches. The former operation occurs when a mobile user moves to a new location registration area and the network is being informed of the mobile user's current location; the latter operation occurs when there is a call for the mobile user and the network must deliver the call to the mobile user. In this paper, we propose and analyze a class of new agent-based forwarding schemes with the objective to reduce the location management cost in mobile wireless networks. We develop analytical models to compare the performance of the proposed schemes with existing location management schemes to demonstrate their feasibility and also to reveal conditions under which our proposed schemes are superior to existing ones. Our proposed schemes are particularly suitable for mobile networks with switches which can cover a large number of location registration areas.     

A Cross-Layer (Layer 2 + 3) Handoff Management Protocol for Next-Generation Wireless Systems

Next-generation wireless systems (NGWS) integrate different wireless networks, each of which is optimized for some specific services and coverage area to provide ubiquitous communications to the mobile users. It is an important and challenging issue to support seamless handoff management in this integrated architecture. The existing handoff management protocols are not sufficient to guarantee handoff support that is transparent to the applications in NGWS. In this work, a cross-layer (Layer 2 + 3) handoff management protocol, CHMP, is developed to support seamless intra and intersystem handoff management in NGWS. Cross-layer handoff management protocol uses mobile's speed and handoff signaling delay information to enhance the handoff performance of Mobile IP that is proposed to support mobility management in wireless IP networks. First, the handoff performance of Mobile IP is analyzed with respect to its sensitivity to the link layer (Layer 2) and network layer (Layer 3) parameters. Then, a cross-layer handoff management architecture is developed using the insights learnt from the analysis. Based on this architecture, the detailed design of CHMP is carried out. Finally, extensive simulation experiments are carried out to evaluate the performance of CHMP. The theoretical analysis and simulation results show that CHMP significantly enhances the performance of both intra and intersystem handoffs.     

Interoperability criteria, mechanisms, and evaluation of system performance for transparently interoperating WLAN and UMTS-HSDPA networks

The main challenge in the development of future wireless communication systems is to provide users with a wide range of services across different radio access technologies through a single mobile terminal, while maintaining the minimum QoS requirements, and ideally with no limits on the coverage area, mobility or radio conditions. Thus, the need for seamless interworking between heterogeneous wireless communication systems consisting of multiple radio access technologies and overlapping networks emerges. In this article we address the main issues that arise while implementing the interoperability mechanisms between two different radio access networks, with emphasis on UMTS-HSDPA and WLAN (HIPERLAN/2). Two interoperability mechanisms are introduced and described in detail: initial user assignment (optimal network selection) and intersystem handover. Both mechanisms are activated via the optimization of a suitably defined cost function which takes into account all the appropriate system level parameters that trigger the interoperability process. Finally, we investigate the overall performance of the proposed mechanisms by means of a software simulation platform. A number of simulations have been carried out in order to demonstrate the performance enhancements achieved by the proposed mechanisms in terms of unsatisfied users, dropped handovers, and system throughput.     

A conflict-insensitive NATed roaming framework using NAToD for proxy mobile IPv4 in WLANs

Providing efficient mobility management in the current Internet is increasingly important due to the quick growth of wireless mobile users. The emerging Proxy Mobile IPv4 (PMIPv4) technique brings a possible solution for that purpose. Since NAT function is widely adopted in IPv4 environment nowadays because of lacking IPv4 addresses, the PMIPv4 interoperating with NAT must be considered. Unfortunately, owing to the possible conflict of private IP address, we encounter a problem in broadcasted point-to-multipoint wireless networks such as IEEE 802.11 networks. To address this issue, we proposed a novel Network Address Translation on Demand (NAToD) scheme, which can well interoperate with the PMIPv4 solution. With our scheme, single public IPv4 addresses can be shared by multiple mobile nodes in both home and foreign networks, low-latency handoff can be achieved, deployment cost can be reduced, and software upgrade can be avoided for mobile nodes in wireless LANs. Our work allows mobile users in WLAN to access Internet based on the advantages of both PMIPv4 and NAT.     

Mitigating location management traffic via aggregation in multi-hop cellular networks

In high mobility areas such as shopping malls and transportation stations, mobile users tend to move in and out in a bursty fashion, and hence location update (LU) and paging signaling cause substantial traffic burden to the cellular networks, leading to signaling congestion. This poses a great challenge to the system design for wireless cellular systems. Traditional cellular systems cannot cope with this situation very well. However, with the ad hoc operational mode recently introduced into the cellular systems, the added multi-hop relaying via mobile devices provides a new way to mitigate location management traffic. In this paper, based on this new architecture, we propose a novel scheme, called aggregative location management, which aggregates multiple location updates into group location updates. For the scenarios of high capacity transit (HCT) systems, we use this grouping scheme to alleviate the signaling traffic when mobile users in an HCT move into new location areas. For other scenarios with mass arrivals of LU requests, we develop a generic aggregative location management scheme in which LU requests can be first aggregated by designated mobile devices and then are periodically sent to the location registers. Performance evaluation is carried out and shows their significant effectiveness.     

Using group mobility and multihomed mobile gateways to connect mobile ad hoc networks to the global IP Internet

Connecting multihop mobile ad hoc wireless networks (MANETs) to the Internet would enable MANET nodes to share wireless Internet access with mobile hosts that are one‐hop away from their foreign networks. The integration of MANETs and the global Internet, however, faces an obstacle due to their network architectural mismatches regarding their infrastructure, topology, and mobility management mechanisms. Solutions to the integration problem should introduce an intermediate facility with hybrid mechanism, enabling it to connect to both networks. The quality of the multihop wireless Internet access service provided to MANET nodes depends on the design quality of this facility in order for MANET nodes to enjoy their Internet connectivity anywhere and anytime without much disconnections. In this paper, we propose hierarchical architecture that uses group mobility and multihomed mobile gateways, and present and analyse different simulations results. A multihomed mobile gateway can simultaneously connect to multiple Mobile IP foreign agents, provided it is located within their overlapping coverage area. It runs updated versions of the destination‐sequenced distance vector (DSDV) and Mobile IP protocols, and is responsible for providing MANET nodes with wireless Internet access though they are multiple wireless hops away from the edge of the Internet. The rationale behind using multihoming is to increase reliability of the Internet access service and enhance performance of the integrated network. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

A survey of mobility management in next-generation all-IP-based wireless systems

Next-generation wireless systems are envisioned to have an IP-based infrastructure with the support of heterogeneous access technologies. One of the research challenges for next generation all-IP-based wireless systems is the design of intelligent mobility management techniques that take advantage of IP-based technologies to achieve global roaming among various access technologies. Next-generation wireless systems call for the integration and interoperation of mobility management techniques in heterogeneous networks. In this article the current state of the art for mobility management in next-generation all-IP-based wireless systems is presented. The previously proposed solutions based on different layers are reviewed, and their qualitative comparisons are given. A new wireless network architecture for mobility management is introduced, and related open research issues are discussed in detail.