Mobility Management Framework Research Articles

Efficient Mobility Management in Mobile Edge Computing Networks: Joint Handover and Service Migration

Mobile edge computing (MEC) has been envisioned as an essential technology for latency-critical applications by providing computing services in close proximity to mobile users. Bringing MEC to come into practice, how to support user mobility remains challenging. In addition to seeking a thorny trade-off between service latency and migration cost, both interactions in space and time exist in mobility management, which requires collaboration among users and perfect prior knowledge, including user mobility and network information. In this paper, we propose an efficient mobility management framework for MEC networks, in which mobility management is operated centered around users’ performance and cost, while radio access and computing service provision are loosely coupled. With a loosely coupled design, the proposed framework exhibits more flexibility and incurs higher complexity. Focusing on multi-user and multi-cell MEC networks, this joint control problem is formulated to maximize the long-term total utility accounting for the service delay and migration cost. Considering the exponential complexity, a distributed mobility management approach is developed, which combines game theory and user-oriented deep reinforcement learning to deal with the interactions in space and time. Simulation results show the efficiency and scalability of the proposed approach.

A Framework to Address Mobility Management Challenges in Emerging Networks

The key enablers for emerging cellular networks such as densification, concurrent operation at multiple bands and harnessing mmWave spectrum give birth to a peculiar set of new network management challenges. One such key challenge is the user mobility management. In this article, we identify the key issues that render current mobility management paradigm inadequate for delivering the expected Quality of Experience (QoE) and resource efficiency in emerging and future cellular networks. Together, these challenges call for paradigm shift in the way mobility is managed in cellular networks. We present an Advanced Mobility Management and Utilization Framework (A-MMUF) that can enable this paradigm shift by transforming mobility management from being a reactive to a proactive process. The core idea of A-MMUF is to build upon Mobility Prediction Models (MPMs) to predict various attributes of user mobility and traffic patterns such as next candidate cell for handover (HO), time of HO, future cell loads. These predictions are then leveraged to not only improve HO process for better QoE and less signaling overhead, but also to enable proactive automation to further maximize network performance in terms of energy and spectrum efficiency. However, understandably, the gains offered by the A-MMUF hinge on the accuracy of the MPMs, which may vary, not only with the choice of underlying machine learning technique, but also with the volume, variety, and fidelity of the training data. We analyze the potential gains of A-MMUF through three case studies: namely proactive HO, proactive Mobility Load Balancing (P-MLB), and proactive Energy Savings (P-ES). In addition to demonstrating significant gains in all three case studies, the results provide useful insights into the agility vs accuracy tradeoff that can be leveraged for choosing optimal machine learning models for practical deployment of A-MMUF.

Urban mobility trends and climate change: sustainability policies in the parking industry

The concern to create cleaner and more ecosystem-friendly production processes has extended to the parking sector in Spain. Since the creation of the multi-level institutional framework for sustainable mobility management (mainly composed of the Infrastructure, Transport and Housing Plan 2012–2024, the Sustainable Urban Mobility Plans, Law 9/2006, and Law 9/2017), environmental considerations, including sustainable management certificates, have occupied a privileged place in public procedures for the management of parking structures and regulated surface parking facilities. Although there have been previous academic studies on the design and implementation of SUMPs and the growth of the parking sector, this article is novel in that it analyzes the market concentration of the parking sector in a scenario where climate change policies are crucial and the importance of sustainability certificates takes on a new meaning. Therefore, the objective of this article is to analyze whether the growing importance of environmental aspects has led to an increase in the concentration level of the parking sector in Spain. For this purpose, several concentration and stability indices are calculated. The results show that, although there are additional factors, the certification of a cleaner activity is relevant in the process of public tenders in the sector, which has served to strengthen the dominance of the most prominent companies in the sector that are in possession of environmental certificates. This shows that environmental policies can also have negative effects on the market, so the results of this analysis are of great value to policymakers.

A Two-Timescale Approach to Mobility Management for Multicell Mobile Edge Computing

Mobile edge computing (MEC) is a promising technology for enhancing the computation capacities and features of mobile users by offloading complex computation tasks to the edge servers. However, mobility poses great challenges on delivering reliable MEC service required for latency-critical applications. First, mobility management has to tackle the dynamics of both user’s location changes and task arrivals that vary in different timescales. Second, user mobility could induce service migration, leading to reliability loss due to the migration delay. In this paper, we propose a two-timescale mobility management framework by joint control of service migration and transmission power to address the above challenges. Specifically, the service migration operates at a large timescale to support user mobility in the multi-cell network, while the power control is performed at a small timescale for real-time task offloading. Their joint control is formulated as an optimization problem aiming at the long-term mobile energy minimization subject to the reliability requirement of computation offloading. To solve the problem, we propose a Lyapunov-based framework to decompose the problem into different timescales, based on which a low-complexity two-timescale online algorithm is developed by exploiting the problem structure. The proposed online algorithm is shown to be asymptotically optimal via theoretical analysis, and is further developed to accommodate the multiuser management. The simulation results demonstrate that our proposed algorithm can significantly improve the energy and reliability performance.

The State of the Art of Cooperative and Connected Autonomous Vehicles from the Future Mobility Management Perspective: A Systematic Review

Cooperative and connected autonomous vehicles (CCAVs) are considered to be a promising solution for addressing congestion and other operational deficiencies, as part of a holistic future mobility management framework. As a result, a significant number of studies have recently been published on this topic. From the perspective of future mobility management, this review paper discusses three themes, which are traffic management, network performance, and mobility management, including congestion, and incident detection using the PRISMA methodology. Three databases were considered for this study, and peer-reviewed primary studies were selected that were published within the last 10 years in the English language, focusing on CCAV in the context of the future transportation and mobility management perspective. For synthesis and interpretation, like-for-like comparisons were made among studies; it was found that extensive research-supported information is required to ensure a smooth transition from conventional vehicles to the CCAVs regime, to achieve the projected traffic and environmental benefits. Research investigations are ongoing to optimize these benefits and associated goals via the setting of different models and simulations. The tools and technologies for the testing and simulation of CCAV were found to have limited capacity. Following the review of the current state-of-the-art, recommendations for future research have been discussed. The most notable is the need for large-scale simulations to understand the impact of CCAVs beyond corridor-based and small-scale networks, the need for understanding the interactions between the drivers of CCAVs and traffic management centers, and the need to assess the technological transition, as far as infrastructure systems are concerned, that is necessary for the progressive penetration of CCAVs into traffic streams.

A novel proactive soft load balancing framework for ultra dense network

A major challenge for the future wireless network is to design the self-organizing architecture. The reactive self-organizing model of traditional networks needs to be transformed into an active self-organizing network. Due to the user mobility and the coverage of small cells, the network load often becomes unbalanced, resulting in poor network performance. Mobility management has become an important issue to ensure seamless communication when users move between cells, and proactive mobility management is one of the important functions of the active Self-Organizing Network (SON). This paper proposes a proactive mobility management framework for active SON, which transforms the original reactive load balancing into a forward-aware and proactive load balancing. The proposed framework firstly uses the BART model to predict the users’ temporal and spatial mobility based on a weekly cycle and then formulate the MLB optimization problem based on the soft load. Two solutions are proposed to solve the above MLB problem. The simulation results show that the proposed method can better optimize the network performance and realize intelligent mobile management for the future network.

Mobility Management for Blockchain-Based Ultra-Dense Edge Computing: A Deep Reinforcement Learning Approach

Ultra-dense edge computing is expected to provide delay-sensitive and computational-intensive services for mobile devices. Due to the complexity and unpredictability of the network environment, it is challenging to ensure the continuity and security of computing offloading services in the process of user movement. Most existing works consider the decisions of communication handover and computational offloading simultaneously while ignoring the security on offloading tasks. In light of this, we propose a secure mobility management framework for blockchain-based ultra-dense edge computing, where blockchain reduces duplicate authentication between edge servers. We jointly optimize the wireless handover and service migration decisions between base stations, which is translated into a multi-objective dynamic optimization problem using the Lyapunov optimization. The optimization problem is solved by deep reinforcement learning approach based on the <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Actor</i> – <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Critic</i> method. Finally, we use simulation studies to evaluate the performance of the proposed scheme. The results show that, compared with other existing schemes, the proposed scheme can reduce the average delay of computing tasks, the rate of tasks failure and the rate of handover.

Mobility Management in Vehicular Named Data Networking

The inherent features of the vehicular ad hoc network (VANET) make it challenging to achieve efficient data delivery. As a new data-centric communication paradigm, the named data networking (NDN) may help to enhance the efficiency of data retrieval in VANET, namely vehicular NDN (VNDN). However, in VNDN, vehicles assume roles of providers, content routers, and consumers, and high mobility leads to frequent reverse-path disruptions and location changes of providers and consumers. This ultimately causes frequent failures of vehicular data delivery. In this letter, we propose a mobility management framework in VNDN to address the reverse-path disruption issue and the provider and consumer mobility support issues. The simulation results show that this framework effectively improves the success rates of data delivery.

Interference mitigation with spectrum sharing and aggregation for SDN based cognitive networks

The Cognitive Radio based Software Defined Network (CR-SDN) integrated with 5G technology provides a promising solution for improving wireless broadband coverage. Cognitive radio technology allows users to communicate with an unlicensed spectrum when it is empty. The proposed Cognitive Radio based Software Defined Networking architecture (CR-SDN) allows Wireless Fidelity (Wi-Fi) and Long Term Evolution (LTE) users to access the Television White Space (TVWS) network whenever there is no vacant band available in Wi-Fi and LTE networks. Wi-Fi and there is a possibility whenever the LTE band interference between two users communicating in the same frequency band simultaneously. This interference should be mitigated, and the spectrum should be shared efficiently among the available users. In this paper, the proposed Interference Mitigation with Spectrum Sharing and Aggregation (IMSSA) technique mitigates the interference and shares the spectrum effectively among licensed and unlicensed users. This technique also aggregates the vacant spectrum within the licensed band (TV band and LTE band) and shares the aggregated band among LTE and Wi-Fi users for achieving a higher data rate. Adaptive Q Learning also made based on the spectrum management adaptive spectrum management, spectrum and a frequency band selection scheme used include dynamic access. This offers high spectrum efficiency and aggregation efficiency for ensuring network performance. The mobility management framework which is adopted in the proposed algorithm undertakes an efficient handover process whenever link failure occurs. In this proposed method, to evaluate the performance following parameter there are transmission rate, primary user analysis and transmission power.

Optimized mobility management for RPL/6LoWPAN based IoT network architecture using the firefly algorithm

RPL (Routing Protocol for low-power and Lossy Networks) is a new attractive model that secures the networks from different routing risks. The dynamic environment and limited resources motivated the research towards identifying a stable, reliable, energy efficient, and scalable routing design. IPv6 over low-power Wireless Personal Area Network (6LoWPAN) is a standard RPL IPv6 routing protocol that provides Low power and Lossy Networks (LLNs) interoperability. In this research work, an energy efficient and optimization-based mobility management framework in RPL routing protocol was proposed (mRPL-based firefly optimization algorithm) to achieve a reliable and stable protocol. From the results, it can be inferred that the proposed system (mRPL+firefly optimizer) showed better performance with regard to the Packet_Delivery_Ratio (PDR), number of hops, End_To_End delay and power consumption when compared to existing systems: RPL, mRPL, mRPL+PSO, and mRPL+ACO. The experimental outcome showed that the proposed system improved the PDR on an average of 2.31% in comparison with existing systems.

Radio access network design with software-defined mobility management

The softwarization of wireless networks has necessitated an overhaul of existing mobility management strategies. Specifically, mobility management is no longer constrained to function within the boundaries of a pre-existing radio access network. Softwarization of the network infrastructure allows resource configurations and associations to be changed on-demand, in a manner so as to support a least cost mobility management framework. To this end, this paper presents an optimal radio access network design framework augmented with user-specific clusters from the perspective of mobility management. The proposed framework is supported by a detailed mathematical model that characterizes user mobility, system traffic, and signaling costs. Performance evaluation is based on a cost comparison with conventional LTE/NR networks, and reinforces the fact that the framework proposed herein results in significant cost reduction, even in the face of changing network scenarios.

Spectrum Handoff Mechanism in the Framework of Mobility Management in Cognitive Radio Networks

Cognitive radio appears as an innovative technology in the field of access to wireless systems, aimed at significantly improving the use of the radio spectrum by allowing an opportunistic access manner. This article deals with some of the important characteristics of the spectrum mobility in cognitive radio networks (CRNs).The new management approach to the mobility and the connection are designed to reduce the latency and loss of information during spectrum handoff. A list of channel safeguards are maintained in this effect, but the maintenance and updates are a challenge. In this article, the authors describe the reasons and mechanisms for spectrum handoff. Algorithms have been developed to illustrate this handoff mechanism and make the comparison between the different methods of spectrum handoff. The simulation results obtained confirm that the proposed method and the algorithms developed presents a better performance.

MRPL+: A mobility management framework in RPL/6LoWPAN

The next generation Internet (also known as Internet-of-Things – IoT), will ubiquitously integrate trillions of computing devices of all kinds, shapes and sizes. For this ubiquity to materialize, a key aspect will certainly be interoperability, the capability of different technologies (e.g. different communication protocols at both horizontal and vertical levels, different hardware platforms, different operating systems, fixed and mobile nodes, etc) to talk to and understand each other. A major enabler for this interoperability is the use of standard and commercial-off-the-shelf technologies (e.g. communication protocols, hardware platforms, operating systems). As IPv6 has become the de-facto communication technology for the Internet, 6LoWPAN has recently started paving the way for extending the Internet to low-power low-cost wireless devices. However, while mobility support will be a requirement (or at least beneficial) in many applications contexts, the support of mobile nodes in the default 6loWPAN/RPL protocol leads to excessive packet loss and delays.In this work, we show that interoperability between fixed and mobile nodes can be successfully achieved through the use of appropriate hand-off and topology management techniques. We propose a mobility management framework (dubbed mRPL+) unifying two hand-off models: (1) hard hand-off, where a mobile node has to break a link before finding a new link, and (2) soft hand-off, where a mobile node selects the new link before disconnecting from the current one. Importantly, mRPL+ is integrated in the 6LoWPAN/RPL stack in a backward compatible manner. Simulation results indicate that in a network with mobile nodes, packet delivery ratio with mRPL+ is nearly 100%, where RPL achieves 80% in best-case. Hand-off process has a disconnected period of few milliseconds (hand-off delay = 4 ms), while RPL experiences few seconds of disconnection during node’s mobility (3−10 s).

A Distributed Mobility Management Framework for 5G Converged Networks

A Distributed Mobility Management Framework for 5G Converged Networks

A comprehensive simulation study of a network-based distributed mobility management framework

New mobility solutions are required for mobile environments characterised by an ever-increasing number of mobile devices and volume of internet data traffic. A single mobility anchor in the current Centralised Mobility Management CMM performs all mobility and routing functionalities. Distributed Mobility Management DMM paradigm is introduced recently to overcome scalability, reliability and non-optimal routing issues of the CMM. The DMM approach is proposed to flatten the network architecture by moving the mobility anchors closer to the users and separating the control and data planes at the network edge. In this paper, we develop and implement a network-based DMM model using NS2 simulation tool. Extensive simulations are performed to evaluate the performance of the DMM against that of the CMM. The simulation results indicate that the DMM approach outperforms the CMM approach under various mobility environments. Thus, this study verifies previous analytical studies and provides more accurate findings in DMM.

PMIPv6 Assistive Cross-Layer Design to reduce handover latency in VANET Mobility for Next Generation Wireless Networks

VANET Networks are one of the main next generation wireless networks which are envisaged to be an integration of homogeneous and heterogeneous wireless networks. The inter-networking of these wireless networks with the Internet will provide ubiquitous access to roaming network users. However, a seamless handover mechanism with negligible handover delay is required to maintain active connections during roaming across these networks. Several solutions, mainly involving host-based localized mobility management schemes, have been widely proposed to reduce handover delay among homogeneous and heterogeneous wireless networks. However, the handover delay remains high and unacceptable for delay-sensitive services such as real-time and multimedia services. Moreover, these services will be very common in next generation wireless networks. Unfortunately, these widely proposed host-based localized mobility management schemes involve the vehicle in mobility-related signalling hence effectively increasing the handover delay. Furthermore, these schemes do not properly address the advanced handover scenarios envisaged in future wireless networks. This paper, therefore, proposes a VANET mobility management framework utilizing cross-layer design, the IEEE 802.21 future standard, and the recently emerged network-based localized mobility management protocol, Proxy Mobile IPv6, to further reduce handover delay.

Integrated mobility and resource management for cross-network resource sharing in heterogeneous wireless networks using traffic offload policies

The problem of efficient use of resources in wireless access networks becomes critical today with users expecting continuous high-speed network access. While access network capacity continues to increase, simultaneous operation of multiple wireless access networks presents an opportunity to increase the data rates available to end-users even further using intelligent cross-network resource sharing. This paper introduces a new integrated mobility and resource management (IMRM) framework for automatic execution of policies for cross-network resource sharing using traffic offload and pre-emptive resource reservation algorithms. The presented framework enables both mobile-initiated and network-initiated resource sharing policies to be executed. This paper presents the framework in detail and analyses its performance using extensive ns-2 simulations of the operation of a set of static policies based on measured signal strength, and dynamic pre-emptive network-initiated policies in a WiFi/WiMAX scenario. The detailed evaluation of the static policies clearly shows that the quality of voice applications shows large deviation, mostly due to very different levels of delay in access networks. Based on these conclusions, this paper presents a design of two new dynamic policies and shows that such policies, when efficiently implemented using the new IMRM framework can greatly improve the capacity of the network to serve voice traffic with a minimal impact on the data traffic and with a very low signalling overhead.

MI3M: A framework for media independent multicast mobility management

The evergrowing explosion in data generation and consumption is of paramount relevance for network operators. Operators strongly rely on techniques which enable efficient and scalable high-bandwidth data distribution, while coping with stricter user expectations in increasingly demanding scenarios, such as mobility in heterogeneous accesses. Primarily designed for efficient transport, IP multicast will be crucial for the successful deployment of video services such as Personal Broadcasting, but faces several technical limitations in such mobile scenarios.This work proposes a novel architecture enabling media-independent multicast mobility management of both multi-interface sources and receivers, while assuring efficient multicast data transport. The architecture provides localized mobility management through PMIPv6 protocol, and is supported by IEEE 802.21 for handover optimization. A full implementation was deployed in a physical testbed, enabling its evaluation in two main scenarios: receiver and source mobility. Its evaluation from the network and video consumer perspective shows that our scheme results in minimal handover impact in mobile multicast environments, for both consumers and producers.

Design and formal security evaluation of NeMHIP: A new secure and efficient network mobility management protocol based on the Host Identity Protocol

NEtwork MObility Basic Support (NEMO BS) is a standardized protocol for managing the mobility of a set of nodes that move together as a whole while having continuous connectivity to the Internet through one or more Mobile Routers (MRs). Because it is based on Mobile IPv6 (MIPv6), it inherits the properties of MIPv6, such as the use of IPsec. However, NEMO BS does not address all the features required by the demanding Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) scenario to provide an integrated and global secure mobility management framework. In addition, unlike MIPv6, the routing in NEMO BS is suboptimal, which makes difficult the provision of an adequate service performance. These characteristics make the application of the NEMO BS protocol not optimum in this scenario. An interesting strategy to provide security and good service performance is to consider a protocol that establishes and maintains Security Associations (SAs), such as the Host Identity Protocol (HIP). Different HIP-based approaches have been defined. However, these HIP-based network mobility solutions still present unsolved issues. In this article, we present a secure and efficient network mobility protocol named NeMHIP. NeMHIP provides secure and optimum mobility management and efficient end-to-end confidentiality and integrity protection apart from the basic security properties inherited from HIP. To evaluate the security provisions of NeMHIP, we have conducted a belief-based formal evaluation. The results demonstrate that the defined security goals are achieved by the protocol. Furthermore, we have performed an automated formal evaluation to validate additional security aspects of NeMHIP. Thus, we have modeled NeMHIP using the AVISPA tool and assessed its security when an intruder is present. The results confirm that NeMHIP is a secure protocol that ensures end-to-end confidentiality and integrity without introducing security leaks to the basic HIP. Thus, we have addressed the need found in the literature for providing security and efficiency in the network mobility scenario.

Spectrum-Aware Mobility Management in Cognitive Radio Cellular Networks

Cognitive radio (CR) networks have been proposed as a solution to both spectrum inefficiency and spectrum scarcity problems. However, they face several challenges based on the fluctuating nature of the available spectrum, making it more difficult to support seamless communications, especially in CR cellular networks. In this paper, a spectrum-aware mobility management scheme is proposed for CR cellular networks. First, a novel network architecture is introduced to mitigate heterogeneous spectrum availability. Based on this architecture, a unified mobility management framework is developed to support diverse mobility events in CR networks, which consists of spectrum mobility management, user mobility management, and intercell resource allocation. The spectrum mobility management scheme determines a target cell and spectrum band for CR users adaptively dependent on time-varying spectrum opportunities, leading to increase in cell capacity. In the user mobility management scheme, a mobile user selects a proper handoff mechanism so as to minimize a switching latency at the cell boundary by considering spatially heterogeneous spectrum availability. Intercell resource allocation helps to improve the performance of both mobility management schemes by efficiently sharing spectrum resources with multiple cells. Simulation results show that the proposed method can achieve better performance than conventional handoff schemes in terms of both cell capacity as well as mobility support in communications.