Mobility and Network Management in Heterogeneous Networks

Abstract

Multiaccess and resource management, mobility management, and network management have emerged as core topics in the design, deployment and operation of current and future networks. The research activity in these areas has grown tremendously over the past decade, addressing the pressing need for ubiquitous and cost-efficient mobile broadband. At the same time, new possibilities and communications paradigms have emerged, bringing about the appearance of new challenges, which had not been considered so far. This special issue comprises peerreviewed articles that provide answers to problems ranging from optimum access selection in overlapping mobile and wireless networks to mobile network virtualization to selfmanaged network architectures with QoS guarantees. The advent and rapid proliferation of broadband cellular networks, on one hand, and wide deployment of Wi-Fi networks, on the other, made wireless Internet access commonplace over the last decade. Today most users access the Internet using a wirelessly connected device and this majority is set only in increase over the coming years. It goes without saying that delays in 3G network deployments in the early 2000s gave impetus to efforts for evenwider deployment of Wi-Fi hot-spots, particularly in urban environments. To many, this was meant to be only a short-term solution. But practice showed that cellular networks were not going to be able to handle on their own the ever-increasing traffic needs. In other words, it became evident that operators and users would have to deal with heterogeneous network access technologies for a considerable period of time. Thus, considerable effort was put into, for instance, alleviating the shortcomings in upper-layer protocol performance over wireless links, mobility and resource management, (multi) access selection, and resource abstraction and virtualization. In short, as the performance of standard upper layer-protocols was far from optimum over wired-cum-wireless networks, the goal was set to adopt a holistic view of the complete system, and consider not only the characteristics of the underlying technologies, but also the particular requirements of on-going services, the policies established by the user and the operator, and so on. This special issue includes articles that address research questions in this vibrant research area, namely mobile and multiaccess networks, resource management and virtualization (see Section 2 below). This line of research was soon followed by Standards Developing Organizations (SDOs) such as 3GPP, IEEE and IETF. For example, the IEEE 802.21 working group specified the Media Independent Handover (MIH) Framework as a proposal to support mobility between heterogeneous access networks, while 3GPP developed the Interworking-Wireless LAN (I-WLAN) architecture and the Access Network Discovery and Selection Function (ANDSF). The IETF work on, for example, Performance Implications of Link CharacterK. Pentikousis (*) Huawei Technologies European Research Centre, Carnotstrasse 4, 10587 Berlin, Germany e-mail: k.pentikousis@huawei.com