Mobility management for all-IP mobile networks: mobile IPv6 vs. proxy mobile IPv6 [architectures and protocols for mobility management in all-IP mobile networks]

Recently, a network-based mobility management protocol called Proxy Mobile IPv6 (PMIPv6) is being actively standardized by the IETF NETLMM working group, and is starting to attract considerable attention among the telecommunication and Internet communities. Unlike the various existing protocols for IP mobility management such as Mobile IPv6 (MIPv6), which are host-based approaches, a network-based approach such as PMIPv6 has salient features and is expected to expedite the real deployment of IP mobility management. In this article, starting by showing the validity of a network-based approach, we present qualitative and quantitative analyses of the representative host-based and network-based mobility management approaches (i.e., MIPv6 and PMIPv6), which highlight the main desirable features and key strengths of PMIPv6. Furthermore, a comprehensive comparison among the various existing well-known mobility support protocols is investigated. Although the development of PMIPv6 is at an early stage yet, it is strongly expected that PMIPv6 will be a promising candidate solution for realizing the next-generation all-IP mobile networks.     

Mobility management protocols for next-generation all-IP satellite networks [architectures and protocols for mobility management in all-IP mobile networks]

To provide ubiquitous terrestrial Internet coverage mobility and Internet-based access to data generated by satellites, there is a strong desire to integrate the terrestrial Internet and satellite networks. This requires satellites that are based on IP for communications. Rotation of low Earth orbit satellites around the Earth results in communicating with different ground stations over time, and requires mobility management protocols for seamless communication between the Internet and satellite networks. In this article we provide a comprehensive summary and comparison of state-of-the-art research on mobility management schemes for satellite networks. The schemes are based on network and transport layers for managing host and network mobility. This article clearly indicates the aspects that need further research and which mobility management schemes are the best candidates for satellite networks.     

未来移动通信网的无线资源管理

自从数字移动通信网以前所未有的穿透力进入移动通信市场以来,人们对无线个人通信（ｗｉｒｅｌｅｓｓ ｐｅｒ—ｓｏｎａｌ ｃｏｍｍｕｎｉｃａｔｉｏｎｓ）的要求与日俱增。这也正是目前无线通信成为工业界主要焦点的源动力之一。随即,互联网的盛行促进了无线用户对高速数据传输的需求,据预测,无线高速多媒体的时代已不遥远。由此,我们可以在展望无线网发展的巨大潜力的同时,也意识到高用户量、高数据传输量和多种业务并存给未来无线网络带来的潜在挑战。解决这一问题不仅需要一流的设备,而且需要一流的无线资源管理技术。 目前国际…     

Location management strategies for cellular mobile networks

Location management in mobile communication systems is concerned with those network functions necessary to allow the users to be reached wherever they are in the network coverage area. The basic operations for that purpose-paging and location updating-are resource-consuming since both involve signalling over the radio link between the mobile stations and base stations. Future cellular mobile communication networks (wireless personal communication networks (PCN)) will have to support a large number of users, so a significant amount of radio signalling can be expected. This paper describes the conventional location management strategy (the one used in modern cellular systems like the Global System for Mobile communications (GSM)) and reviews, describes and comments on some alternative location management proposals for future high-density PCN environments that aim to reduce this expected high (radio) signalling load     

Mobility management in third-generation all-IP networks

It is now widely recognized that using IP as the foundation for next-generation mobile networks makes strong economic and technical sense, since it takes advantage of the ubiquitous installed IP infrastructure, capitalizes on the IETF standardization process, and benefits from both existing and emerging IP-related technologies and services. The large-scale support of data services and their integration with legacy services are the common objectives of all wireless efforts termed third generation (3G) and beyond. In these all-IP wireless networks, IP can be deployed in two modes: the transport mode and the native mode. As we show in this article, this duality in the use of IP has a significant impact on network efficiency and performance. It is the extended native use of IP in the terrestrial segment of a wireless operator's domain that more readily allows for building a converged network with multiple access technologies. We then discuss the different levels of mobility in the all-IP network. In particular, our focus is on micromobility, and on the issue of seamless localized mobility within the converged network. After reviewing the mobility schemes that have emerged in previous years, we describe a hierarchical mobility management scheme based on multiprotocol label switching (MPLS). The scheme employs an enhanced type of MPLS routers, called label edge mobility agents, and is scalable, efficient, and flexible. It directly inherits the noted capabilities of MPLS in terms of support of QoS, traffic engineering, advanced IP services, and fast restoration. This scheme does not use nodes that are specific to any given wireless technology, and is well suited for gradual deployment     

Mobility management in wireless ATM networks

Mobile ATM offers a common wired network infrastructure to support mobility of wireless terminals, independent of the wireless access protocol. In addition, it allows seamless migration to future wireless broadband services, such as wireless ATM, by enabling mobility of end-to-end ATM connections. In spite of the diversity in mobile networking technologies (e.g., cellular telephony, mobile-IP, packet data services, PCS), all of them require two fundamental mechanisms: location management and handoff. This article describes different schemes for augmenting a wired ATM network to support location management of mobile terminals and handoff protocols for rerouting a connection data path when the endpoint moves. A prototype implementation of mobile ATM integrating mobility support with ATM signaling and connection setup, is presented. It shows how mobile ATM may be used to provide mobility support to an IP terminal using non-ATM wireless access     

Mobility management in integrated wireless-ATM networks

There is an emerging interest in integrating mobile wireless communication with Broadband ISDN based on the ATM technology. Many issues arise when such integration is attempted. This paper addresses the problem of mobility management, i.e., that of tracking the current ATM addresses of mobile terminals and sustaining active ATM connections as mobiles move. The paper presents some architectural options for integrating wireless access to ATM networks and highlights an architecture based oninterworking devices to provide transparent mobility support in existing ATM networks. Location management and handoff solutions for this architecture are then presented. Also, how procedures for multiprotocol transport over ATM networks may be adopted to perform location management is described.A version of this paper appeared in the proceedings of ACM Mobicom '95.     

Mobility management in heterogeneous wireless networks

In heterogeneous wireless networks, mobile users are able to move from their home networks to different foreign networks while maintaining access capability to their subscribed services, which refers to global mobility. One of the key challenges in global mobility management is intersystem location management, which consists of keeping track of mobile users who roam into foreign networks. This paper presents an overview of mobility management in heterogeneous wireless networks and introduces a scheme which improves location management efficiency in terms of total signaling costs and intersystem paging delay. More specifically, cost reduction reaches about 50% when comparing the proposed architecture with conventional architectures.     

Two-tier dynamic load balancing in SDN-enabled Wi-Fi networks

This work proposes a Software Defined Networking (SDN) solution to address Wi-Fi congestion due to an unevenly distributed load among access points (APs). The conventional methods generally let client stations learn of APs’ load status and select APs distributively. However, such a client-driven approach lacks a global view to make precise load balancing decisions and may result in repeated changes in client-AP association. Although several studies proposed more efficient network-controlled methods to carry out Wi-Fi load balancing, some of them are distributed methods incurring excessive message exchange among customized APs, while the rest centralized methods are found to burden the central controller with unnecessary AP association decisions. In contrast, our solution adopts standardized OpenFlow protocol and SDN controller technology to Wi-Fi networks, organizing the SDN controller and the APs into a two-tier architecture so that the controller can evaluate the degree of load balancing among the APs and decide up to which load level the APs can accept association requests without consulting the controller. From our experiment results, our solution improves Wi-Fi’s load balancing degree by 34–41%, and yields an improvement of 28–36% in Wi-Fi’s re-association time over generic centralized load balancing methods with positive control.     

Mobility management alternatives for migration to mobile Internet session-based services

Session-based Internet protocol (IP) applications, such as Internet telephony, are an important component of the emerging mobile Internet. The ubiquitous availability of these services is critical to the success of the mobile Internet. Because all-IP networks will be deployed in phases and current mobile telecommunication systems will be in operation for decades to come, the interworking and migration between current network services and all-IP services is a key problem. In this paper, we address seamless roaming for session initiation protocol-based services across current cellular telecommunication networks and emerging all-IP wireless networks, such as those using third-generation and WiFi networks. We present an abstract mobility model, and map this model to three basic approaches for supporting seamless mobility: a master-slave approach, a federated system, and a unified approach. We discuss the challenges and implementation of an instance of the unified mobility management approach, called the Unified Mobility Manager, and then compare the tradeoffs of the three systems using a comparative performance analysis. We conclude that unified mobility management is most efficient if a great deal of interworking is required, and as more users invoke IP-based services; the federated approach is efficient when a single network technology is dominant and data access is limited, but requires sharing of data across networks; the master-slave approach is the least efficient, but is easy to introduce if the number of network types is small.     

Mobility management and control protocol for wireless ATM networks

The introduction of wireless ATM (WATM) in customer premises network environments necessitates the design of mobility protocols, since the existing versions of B-ISDN signaling do not support terminal mobility. Such protocols can be deployed either as extensions to the standard signaling capabilities, or as individual solutions that have little or no impact on existing infrastructures (switches, signaling software, etc.). A WATM architecture that adopts the latter approach is presented. After a discussion of the problems encountered in the integration of wireless networking and B-ISDN ATM technologies, a mobility management and control (MMC) protocol is proposed. Finally, in the framework of the proposed MMC protocol, algorithms for implementing mobility procedures (handover and registration) are described     

Self-organized public-key management for mobile ad hoc networks

In contrast with conventional networks, mobile ad hoc networks usually do not provide online access to trusted authorities or to centralized servers, and they exhibit frequent partitioning due to link and node failures and to node mobility. For these reasons, traditional security solutions that require online trusted authorities or certificate repositories are not well-suited for securing ad hoc networks. We propose a fully self-organized public-key management system that allows users to generate their public-private key pairs, to issue certificates, and to perform authentication regardless of the network partitions and without any centralized services. Furthermore, our approach does not require any trusted authority, not even in the system initialization phase.     

Mobility control and its applications in mobile ad hoc networks

Most existing localized protocols in mobile ad hoc networks, such as data communication and topology control, use local information for decentralized decision among nodes to achieve certain global objectives. These objectives include determining a small connected dominating set for virtual backbone and topology control by adjusting transmission ranges of nodes. Because of asynchronous sampling of local information at each node, delays at different stages of protocol handshake, and movement of mobile nodes, the local view captured at different nodes many be inconsistent and/or outdated and many not reflect the actual network situation. The former may cause "bad" decisions that fail to keep the given global constraint such as global domination and connectivity, and the latter may incur "broken" links, which in turn would ultimately cause the failure of the constraint. In this article we review some techniques that handle inconsistent and outdated local views. These techniques are illustrated using several well-known protocols in data communication and topology control.     

Mobility management support and performance analysis for wireless MPLS networks

Multi‐Protocol Label Switching (MPLS) is deployed in the Internet backbone to support service differentiation and traffic engineering. In recent years, there has been interest in extending the MPLS capability to wireless access networks for mobility management support. In this paper, we present analysis of Micro Mobile MPLS, a new micro‐mobility management scheme which integrates the Mobile IP and MPLS protocols by using two‐level hierarchy architecture. Our proposal supports two protocol variants. First, the fast handoff process, which anticipates the LSP procedure set‐up with neighboring locations where a mobile node (MN) may move to, is provided to reduce service disruption. Second, a new mechanism based on the forwarding chain concept is proposed to track efficiently the host mobility within a domain. This concept can significantly reduce registration update costs and provide low handoff latency. Analytical models are developed and simulations are conducted to justify the benefits of our proposed mechanisms. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

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.     

Handover management for mobile nodes in IPv6 networks

We analyze IPv6 handover over wireless LAN. Mobile IPv6 is designed to manage mobile nodes' movements between wireless IPv6 networks. Nevertheless, the active communications of a mobile node are interrupted until the handover completes. Therefore, several extensions to Mobile IPv6 have been proposed to reduce the handover latency and the number of lost packets. We describe two of them, hierarchical Mobile IPv6, which manages local movements into a domain, and fast handover protocol, which allows the use of layer 2 triggers to anticipate the handover. We expose the specific handover algorithms proposed by all these methods. We also evaluate the handover latency over IEEE 802.11b wireless LAN. We compare the layer 2 and layer 3 handover latency in the Mobile IPv6 case in order to show the saving of time expected by using anticipation. We conclude by showing how to adapt the IEEE 802.11b control frames to set up such anticipation.     

Adaptive methods for location management in mobile cellular networks

Future mobile cellular networks will include complex algorithms and procedures that make them able to react optimally to the fluctuating conditions (propagation, traffic, services, ...). Among these mechanisms, location management is an important one as it deals with an essential function of the mobile cellular networks: locate each subscriber to provide him/her with the subscribed services. In this paper, we present the location management methods that are currently implemented in cellular networks and the adaptive methods that have been proposed for future mobile cellular networks. These methods are evaluated for different scenarios and their performance are compared by means of simulations.     

Mobility management in current and future communications networks

This article describes current and proposed protocols for mobility management for public land mobile networks (PLMNs), Mobile IP, wireless ATM, and satellite networks. The integration of these networks is discussed in the context of the next evolutionary step of wireless communications networks. First, a review is provided of location management algorithms for PCS implemented over a PLMN. The latest protocol changes for location registration and handoff are investigated for Mobile IP, followed by a discussion of proposed protocols for wireless ATM and satellite networks. Finally, an outline of open problems to be addressed by the next generation of wireless network service is discussed     

Group location management for mobile subscribers on transportation systems in mobile communication networks

We propose a new location tracking scheme for subscribers on transportation systems (TSs) in which a large number of fast-moving users have the same location as the TS. The group location tracking (GLT) scheme in which a group location update is performed instead of the IS-41's individual location update has been proposed. We propose a distributed GLT (DGLT) scheme based on several virtual visitor location registers (VVLRs) and representative identities. We analyze the GLT and DGLT schemes in view of the database (DB) access cost as well as the signaling cost under one-dimensional network architecture. Compared with the IS-41 scheme, the schemes based on group management generally have a lower signaling cost and a lower DB access cost due to a significant reduction in the number of location updates. As user mobility increases or the number of users on a TS increases, the performance of the group management schemes improves. The DGLT scheme, in which a corresponding home location register selects a closest VVLR among several possible VVLRs, generally has a lower signaling cost although a DB access cost is increased slightly compared with the GLT scheme. We also obtain the regions in which the DGLT is more efficient than the IS-41 and the GLT scheme. The DGLT scheme is an appropriate solution for high signaling cost systems and the GLT scheme is useful for high DB access cost systems.