A quality-of-service signaling architecture for seamless handover support in next generation,IP-based mobile networks

The coupling of signaling protocols for mobility management and resource reservation plays an important role to achieve Quality-of-Service (QoS) in wireless environments. When performing a handover, request and allocation of resources have to be done in the shortest possible time to avoid disruptions for the user service. Therefore, it is preferable to ensure resource availability in advance, which we call anticipated handover. This approach for providing seamless handovers in turn poses challenges for the overall design of the QoS architecture and its associated QoS signaling protocol. This article describes the design, implementation, and evaluation of a comprehensive QoS architecture and a suitable QoS signaling protocol. It discusses intrinsic problems of reservations in IP based networks such as session ownership as well as a number of protocol design issues regarding the integration of QoS signaling with other protocols, such as Mobile IP. In particular, we define an end-to-end QoS architecture and a mobility-aware reservation signaling protocol Mobility Aware Reservation Signaling Protocol (MARSP) that supports anticipated handover, thus enabling seamless services over heterogeneous wireless access networks. The presented architecture and protocol were implemented and evaluated by measurements. They show that anticipated handovers not only outperform hard handovers regarding handover latency, but that they also provide functional and robustness advantages. Authors Hillebrand and Prehofer changed their affiliation in the meantime, the work described in this paper was carried out during their employment at DoCoMo Communications Laboratories Europe.