Context-aware adaptive IP mobility anchoring

Abstract

The novel distributed mobility management trend is a promising direction to cope with the increasing mobile data traffic and flatten network architectures. Most of the novel mobility approaches distribute the mobility anchors through the access level, as opposed to the centralized mobility anchoring model. Other recent approaches argue that mobility anchors closer to the content servers may be the solution to optimize the mobility performance. However, none of the mobility anchoring models is ideal for all scenarios, since it depends on the user, the session and the network. Hence, we propose an IP mobility approach driven by the context of the user, sessions and the network, where the mobility anchors for IP address allocation and for routing/forwarding are distributed through the network nodes, while the mobility context is managed by the mobile devices. Although each session is properly anchored in the establishment phase, the routing/forwarding is adapted over time, according to the user, the session and the network context: the proposed approach is able to signal different mobility anchors to optimize the routing path to new and ongoing sessions of the user. The outcome of the evaluation shows that the proposed approach overall reduces the data cost, the data delay, the tunneled packets and the tunnel length, when compared with other anchoring models.