A novel scheme for mobility management in heterogeneous wireless networks

In this paper, we present a mobility management scheme for real-time multimedia sessions over heterogeneous wireless networks. Most approaches in the current literature use Mobile IP (MIP) or Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) to maintain real-time sessions during mobility. In this paper, we analyze MIP and SIP in terms of the mobility rate, packet loss and packet overheads in the user plane and propose a mechanism by which the network can choose the optimum protocol for mobility management. We perform the analysis for constant bit rate (CBR) as well as for variable bit rate (VBR) traffic. We show that for CBR traffic, the proposed mechanism leads to 12–35% improvement in the system capacity, while for VBR traffic, capacity improvements ranging from about 35–50% can be obtained. Our proposed approach and the analysis are applicable to handovers between different IP domains both in homogeneous as well as in heterogeneous wireless networks.