IMS-Based Centralized Service Continuity

The IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) has been selected as a telecommunication industrial standard for the signal processing in the heterogeneous access networks. It is also brought up to handle the mobility management. However, the mobility of the user equipment (UE) may disrupt or even intermittently disconnect an ongoing real-time session, which heavily affects the satisfaction of the users. Therefore, how to reduce the service disruption time gets more and more important. This paper first proposes a centralized service continuity scheme, abbreviated as CSC, in IMS-based networks. The CSC treats handover as a service in the IMS network. Its architecture and operation are based on service invocation. The service continuity procedure is performed by an application server called CSC AS. The CSC AS can carry out the third-party call control for fast session re-establishment by initiating two INVITE requests concurrently. In addition, a variant of the CSC, denoted by CSC*, is derived by adopting the E-IMS AKA with one-pass authentication for achieving the acceleration of IMS registration during the handover. Analytical results show that both schemes could shorten the handover latency significantly, as compared with the standard IMS-based service continuity.