Flexible Mobility Management Research Articles

QoS-Aware Flexible Handover Management in Software-Defined Mobile Networks

Handover support is one of the important issues in mobile networks to guarantee the quality of service (QoS) requirements for mobile users. Alongside the development of network technologies, handover management to provide service continuity has been researched and applied for the Internet or cellular networks such as 3G/4G/5G. However, each network paradigm provides its own individual handover management system, even though there are different kinds of QoS requirements for various mobile services. This causes inefficient network resource utilization from the network operators’ perspectives. Therefore, this paper proposes a QoS-aware flexible mobility management scheme for software-defined networking (SDN)-based mobile networks. The proposed scheme classifies flows into four classes based on the QoS requirements of services in terms of delay and loss tolerance. According to the classified service characteristics, it provides a differential handover method for each flow class to support efficient network operation without any service degradation by interacting between the forwarding plane nodes and SDN controller. The performance analysis shows that the proposed scheme enables flexible network resource utilization, satisfying the QoS requirements for each class well compared to the conventional schemes that only consider their own individual handover procedure.

A flexible IPv6 mobility management architecture for SDN‐based 5G mobile networks

AbstractWith the advent of increasingly diverse services, applications, and use cases, the 5G mobility environment is expected to be highly heterogeneous. The distributed mobility management (DMM) is emerging as a promising approach for 5G, which provides decentralized handover and traffic management at the edge of the network. However, in order to meet the disparate mobility needs, the DMM process requires flexible design considerations. This paper presents a novel mobile node (MN) centered, software‐defined networking (SDN)–based flexible mobility management architecture, named adaptive multimode mobility management (A3M), which can adaptively operate in multiple modes. The proposed A3M architecture incorporates a novel handover mode selection phase among the traditional handover phases during which a suitable mode of handover operation is evaluated. This makes the A3M handover process adaptable to the varying mobility requirements of the MN and enables it to provide differentiated handover management for MNs with different mobility profiles. The performance analysis of A3M shows that it offers optimal handover performance in terms of primary handover performance metrics such as session disruption delay, packet losses, and signaling costs, compared to the popular network‐based DMM approaches.

An adaptive fuzzy handover triggering approach for Long-Term Evolution network

To cope with the increasing demand for efficient data delivery, self-organizing networks have been introduced in the Long Term Evolution (LTE) system to provide autonomous and flexible mobility management. The existing handover triggering scheme for LTE is not flexible enough to incorporate new performance metrics, and it introduces handover latency. There are studies on non-conventional handoff algorithms for LTE applications, for instance, the fuzzy logic approach. However, the fuzzy logic approach needs regular manual tuning to constantly produce optimal output. In this paper, we address this issue by proposing an adaptive fuzzy logic-based handoff decision algorithm, which can cope with environmental changes and improve efficiency by reducing human intervention. Performance results show that the proposed algorithm can reduce unnecessary handovers by about 20% compared with the fuzzy logic and conventional LTE handover triggering scheme, leading to reduced packet loss rates.

Assignment Strategies for Mobile Data Users in Hierarchical Overlay Networks: Performance of Optimal and Adaptive Strategies

Hierarchical wireless overlay networks have been proposed as an attractive alternative and extension of cellular network architectures to provide the necessary cell capacities to effectively support next-generation wireless data applications. In addition, they allow for flexible mobility management strategies and quality-of-service differentiation. One of the crucial problems in hierarchical overlay networks is the assignment of wireless data users to the different layers of the overlay architecture. In this paper, we present a framework and several analytical results pertaining to the performance of two assignment strategies based on the user's velocity and the amount of data to be transmitted. The main contribution is to prove that the minimum average number of users in the system, as well as the minimum expected system load for an incoming user, are the same under both assignment strategies. We provide explicit analytical expressions as well as unique characterizations of the optimal thresholds on the velocity and amount of data to be transmitted. These results are very general and hold for any distribution of user profiles and any call arrival rates. We also show that intelligent assignment strategies yield significant gains over strategies that are oblivious to the user profiles. Adaptive and on-line strategies are derived that do not require any a priori knowledge of the user population and the network parameters. Extensive simulations are conducted to support the theoretical results presented and conclude that the on-line strategies achieve near-optimal performance when compared with off-line strategies.

Quality of service and mobility for the wireless internet

Our paper explores the issue of how to provide appropriate quality of service mechanisms closely integrated with flexible mobility management in wireless local area networks. We consider them as access networks of choice for the high performance Wireless Mobile Internet. We present a hierarchical QoS architecture that extends Differentiated Services (DiffServ) to mobile hosts in a wireless environment. Our approach is based on controlling several parameters of a wireless LAN cell: the limited geographical span to ensure the same high bit rate for all hosts, the constrained rate of traffic sources to limit the use of the channel in function of the required QoS and the limited number of active hosts to keep the load sufficiently low. The QoS management is coupled with mobility management at the IP level. We use a micro-mobility scheme implemented in the IPv6 layer with fast hand-offs between adjacent cells. Micro-mobility avoids address translation, traffic tunneling, and enables fast hand-offs. We give some details of experiments to show the quality of service differentiation over the 802.11b network.