Mobility Management Procedures Research Articles

Machine Learning-Based Solutions for Handover Decisions in Non-Terrestrial Networks

The non-terrestrial network (NTN) is a network that uses radio frequency (RF) resources mounted on satellites and includes satellite-based communications networks, high altitude platform systems (HAPS), and air-to-ground networks. The fifth generation (5G) and NTN may be crucial in utilizing communication infrastructure to provide 5G services in the future, anytime and anywhere. Based on the outcome of the Rel-16 study, the 3rd generation partnership project (3GPP) decided to start a work item on an NTN in 5G new radio (NR) Rel-17, and the focus of the study was on mobility management procedures, due to the movements of NTN platforms; especially, low earth orbit (LEO) satellites. Handover enhancements were discussed to tackle the frequent handover due to the fast satellite movement. Therefore, the major problem of handover in LEO satellite systems was the signaling storm created by handing over all user equipment (UE) in a cell to a new cell because when the UE crosses the boundary between the neighboring cell of a satellite, an intra-satellite or cell handover occurs; thus, all users in a cell are expected to experience a change of cell due to handover every few seconds. In addition, UE location is not easy to define due to moving cell/beam situations. In this study, we propose machine learning-based solutions for handover decisions in non-terrestrial networks for cell handovers or intra-satellite handovers to reduce signaling storms during handovers where the handover requests will be executed by clustered users. First, the dataset was generated by the simulator that simulates communication between users and satellites. Second, we preprocessed the data, and also used the feature creation technique to create the distance feature using the Haversine formula, and then applied clustering and classification algorithms. The experimental results show that the distance between a user and its cell center is an important parameter for handover decisions in NTN, and the random forest outperforms all models with a higher accuracy of 99% along with a better F1-score of 0.9961.

Device and network driven cellular networks architecture and mobility management technique for fog computing-based mobile communication system

In this paper, we propose a metric and performance-based mode switching procedure for 5G and beyond mobile fog networks. The network interchange mode of communication between network-centric and device-centric modes, the mode switching procedure is subject to the network’s quality of service (QoS) and quality of experience (QoE) parameters. If the quality parameters are less than the pre-set threshold value, the network selects a relay node as intermediate nodes to avail the device-centric mode of communication. During the communication, the network information’s are retrieved from the nearby fog nodes and the process by intelligent base stations. Our next contribution is a relay node assisted mobility management procedure. As the mobile nodes change the position frequently within the network service area, an efficient mobility management procedure is required to improve the network’s performance. We propose a unique mobility management procedure, it follows the movement prediction procedure and helps the mobile nodes to avail the device-centric communication in dynamic fog networks, we classify it for dynamic and static mobile users. To check the effectiveness, efficiency, and parameterized dependency of the proposed work, we formulate the process with respect to several dependent factors and comparing our results with the latest state-of-the-art networks technologies subject to communication delay and latency, energy consumption, without any compromise in node mobility and call to mobility ratio. Finally, we achieve better performance to gain the QoS and QoE.

Signaling Overhead Reduction Techniques in Device-to-Device Communications: Paradigm for 5G and Beyond

Device-to-Device (D2D) communications have recently attracted researchers, attention because of their numerous applications in industry verticals. It enables communications among devices without or with the partial involvement of a central system. To initiate a D2D communications device discovery and radio resource allocation is a critical task when devices have high mobility. Maintaining the quality-of-service and continuous connectivity requires a signaling burden. An efficient mobility management procedure is necessary to discover the neighboring devices in D2D communications systems. The Discovery of a massive number of devices requires an effective radio resource management procedure that causes signaling overhead. In 5G and beyond communication system, two mobility management methods exist; device discovery and beaconing. Since device density and traffic increases exponentially with high mobility, hence device discovery and beaconing increase the signaling overhead and energy consumption in power-limited devices. Thus, signaling overhead research needs much attention in 5G and beyond systems to meet the service requirements like accuracy, latency, and battery life. Therefore, the challenges and the techniques related to signaling overhead in D2D communications are presented.

A Fog Computing-Based Device-Driven Mobility Management Scheme for 5G Networks.

The fog computing-based device-driven network is a promising solution for high data rates in modern cellular networks. It is a unique framework to reduce the generated-data, data management overheads, network scalability challenges, and help us to provide a pervasive computation environment for real-time network applications, where the mobile data is easily available and accessible to nearby fog servers. It explores a new dimension of the next generation network called fog networks. Fog networks is a complementary part of the cloud network environment. The proposed network architecture is a part of the newly emerged paradigm that extends the network computing infrastructure within the device-driven 5G communication system. This work explores a new design of the fog computing framework to support device-driven communication to achieve better Quality of Service (QoS) and Quality of Experience (QoE). In particular, we focus on, how potential is the fog computing orchestration framework? How it can be customized to the next generation of cellular communication systems? Next, we propose a mobility management procedure for fog networks, considering the static and dynamic mobile nodes. We compare our results with the legacy of cellular networks and observed that the proposed work has the least energy consumption, delay, latency, signaling cost as compared to LTE/LTE-A networks.

Wake-up Radio-Based 5G Mobile Access: Methods, Benefits, and Challenges

Future mobile networks will enable new use cases, requiring further enhanced data rates, latency, coverage, capacity, and reliability. In this article, to emphasize sustainable energy consumption and improved device battery lifetime, the concept, benefits, and challenges of utilizing wake-up radio-based access in 5G networks are reviewed and discussed. To this end, the operating principle and associated wake-up signal structures are first reviewed, together with the corresponding power consumption and buffering delay trade-offs. Then the applicability of wake-up methods at mmWave bands and beamforming systems is addressed and highlighted. Additionally, an energy-efficient mobility management procedure for wake-up radio-based devices is described and demonstrated, utilizing narrowband uplink reference signals. Overall, the article provides an overview of wake-up-based access in 5G systems as a promising power-saving mechanism, and discusses the associated prospects, benefits, and challenges.

Anchor-Based Active Set for User-Centric Multi-Connectivity: Mobility Enhancement and Performance Evaluation

By organizing a dynamic transmission point group, user-centric networks (UCNs) are considered as a feasible solution to mine the potentials of dense networks where the densification gain is blocked by strong interference and frequent handovers. However, the state-of-art studies mostly focus on improving throughput performance. In this paper, user-centric multi-connectivity architecture is proposed, where multiple small cells serve the user as a user-specific active set to reduce the number of radio link failures (RLFs) and to increase the throughput gain, especially for cell-edge users. Especially, master eNodeB (MeNB) is chosen in the active set as a mobility anchor to control its neighboring small cells that are termed as slave eNodeBs (SeNBs), which reduces signaling overheads during handovers. To provide user-centric service, the active set follows the user's trajectory by adding new SeNB that provides strong signal strength and releasing serving SeNB that is far away from the user. Moreover, the design of key mobility management procedures for active set forming/reforming is taken into consideration. The results show that compared with single connectivity, the RLF in the proposed architecture shows a decrease of more than 50% when user speed is 3 km/h, and the average user throughput achieves an increase of around 74% gains when TP density is 2000 TPs/km 2 .

Tracking Area Update and Paging in 5G Networks: a Survey of Problems and Solutions

The 5th Generation wireless systems (5G) is expected to accommodate exceptional services beyond current cellular systems. To achieve this goal, however, ongoing studies are still developing new schemes to provide seamless connections to the ever increasing density of high-mobility User Equipments (UEs). That means that the network needs to track all UEs while moving throughout the coverage area for the purpose of data-packet delivery. The two Mobility Management (MM) procedures that are essential to localize a specific UE and deliver data packets to that UE are known as Tracking Area Update (TAU) and Paging, which are burdensome to the system because of very high-volume traffic. Therefore, MM will become a crucial problem for 5G requirements; how to support real-time applications and provide close-to-zero latency for life-critical systems? This paper addresses a variety of problems that should be faced and discusses various solution schemes in terms of implementation complexity, latency, and computation overhead for both the TAU and Paging. Because 5G systems will work in conjunction with current Long Term Evolution (LTE) systems and the latter is retuned to use as a base design for future 5G, our discussion starts from current LTE solutions towards 5G MM improvements. In this context, this paper emphasizes a new key design for 5G and explains the challenges that impact both the network performance and UE experience (e.g., power saving). Next, we critically discuss the applicability of current LTE solution schemes (in terms of TAU and Paging costs) and evaluate them for 5G use cases. To the best of our knowledge, this paper is the first study that emphasizes and gives a critique on using of different types of UE mobility models (based on the given studies), which are used to analyze the network performance that interacts with the UE movements. In this context, some 5G improvement schemes are discussed.

Performance based user-centric dynamic mode switching and mobility management scheme for 5G networks

User-centric communication in fifth generation (5G) network enables wireless peer-to-peer network interface between mobile users in order to improve the data rate and offload the traffic for improved QoE as compared to traditional legacy base station centric (network centric or eNB centric) architecture. In this paper, we introduce a user-centric performance based cooperative cellular communication architecture and device mobility management procedure for 5G networks. Due to the exponential growth of connected devices, the users are deployed very densely. It motivate the researcher for user-centric communication, and it is a feasible approach, where the user can communicate via a relay node with minimum network infrastructure support. The proposed approach is central to mode switching and supporting a high degree of user mobility during the communication. The mode switching techniques is depends on quality parameters (such as link utilization, delay, and energy consumption). When the network switches the communication link from traditional mode (network centric) to user-centric mode of communication, it resort to relays to sustained the quality parameters. The relay selection is a random process, the network selects an arbitrary node as a relay node without any negotiation on performance metrics and node mobility. In order to improve the network mobility management performance, a mobility management scheme is proposed, where the system computes the QoS/QoE and make a decision for mode switching between network-centric to user-centric or vice-versa. The proposed technique show better performance over the traditional cellular network and we compare our results with 4G/Long Term Evolution (LTE), with respect to link utilization, energy consumption, call-to-mobility ratio analysis and system scalability. The performance analysis and comparison demonstrates the superiority of proposed system in terms of QoE parameters as compared to LTE networks.

PAAS: PMIPv6 Access Authentication Scheme Based on Identity-Based Signature in VANETs

Due to the advantages of low handover latency and signaling costs, Proxy Mobile IPv6 (PMIPv6), as a localized mobility management protocol for next generation mobile network, can be well combined with vehicular ad-hoc networks. However, the lack of security considerations limits the rapid growth of PMIPv6. Unfortunately, few proposals are in the literature to address such issue. Motivated by this, a novel authentication scheme based on identity-based signature for PMIPv6 is proposed. Mutual authentication between mobile node and mobile access gateway is achieved for both intra-domain and inter-domain scenarios with the help of identity-based signature and service-level agreement. The authentication signaling can be finely integrated into the mobility management procedure of PMIPv6, which equips our scheme with high authentication efficiency. The formal security proof under SVO logic and the performance analysis are presented to demonstrate the robustness and efficiency of our proposed scheme.

A Universal Predictive Mobility Management Scheme for Urban Ultra-dense Networks with Control/Data Plane Separation

In recent years, a new concept of network architecture with control/data plane separation is introduced to the future network, which can effectively improve the mobility robustness and reduce the handover failure by providing the data plane services under the umbrella of a macro cell coverage layer. However, in the ultra dense network, frequent data plane handovers would still introduce huge signaling exchanges and latencies. In this paper, we propose a universal predictive mobility management scheme for urban ultra-dense networks to speed up the data plane handover process. We utilize the probability suffix tree model to save and analyze the transition relationships between small cells in terms of variable markov chains, and pre-configure a cluster of small cells with larger handover probabilities for the users. To accommodate different versions of the users, a compatible network-controlled predictive mobility management procedure and an advanced user-autonomous predictive mobility management procedure are proposed to support the proposed predictive mobility management scheme. The simulation results show that the proposed scheme can significantly improve the prediction accuracy with a lower redundant configuration cost and can effectively speed up the data plane handover process compared with the traditional mobility management.

Software-Defined Mobility Management: Architecture Proposal and Future Directions

A common characteristic for all of the uses in 5G wireless networks is the ubiquity and the almost permanent connection to the mobile network to get access to external applications. This really imposes a challenge in the signaling procedures provided to get track of the user and to guarantee session continuity. The mobility management mechanisms will play a central role in the 5G networks because of the always-on connectivity demand. This article presents a software defined approach to mobility management procedures addressing the present challenges and proposing some future directions for a more efficient service provision and a better usage of the network resources. The feasibility of such a Software-Defined Mobility Management architecture is assessed in a specific test-bed.

Performance Evaluation for Local Anchor-Based Dual Connectivity in 5G User-Centric Network

Ultra-dense network (UDN) is considered as one of the most promising techniques in achieving the increasingly explosive growth of data rates for future 5G system. However, a large number of small cells lead to the increased cell edges and the rugged inter-cell interference, which cause frequent handover events and more radio link failure. In this paper, a local anchor-based dual connectivity (DC) architecture is proposed for a user-centric network based on the analysis of mobility management challenges of UDN. Under the proposed architecture, the local anchor acts as the master eNodeB (MeNB) with neighboring small cells acting as slave eNodeBs (SeNBs) to provide DC transmission for user-centric service following each user’s movement. Key procedures for mobility management are correspondingly provided and both the MeNBs and SeNBs are selected from the small cells to investigate the potential of them, which are different from the mobility management methods under the traditional cellular architecture. Performance evaluations are conducted under different parameter configurations to evaluate the maximum potential of the proposed scheme. Simulation results show that in our proposed scheme, the handover failure rate shows a maximum decrease of more than 53% and the average user spectrum efficiency achieves an increase of 5% gains over the current LTE system when the user equipment speed is 3 km/h.

HMMCCN: a hierarchical mobility management scheme for content-centric networking

Content-centric networking CCN has emerged as a promising paradigm in current internet. Owing to the interest-driven, we concern more about the content itself rather than the place it located, and therefore, CCN supports subscriber mobility natively, however, it remains a major challenge in publisher mobility. In this paper, we propose a hierarchical mobility management scheme for CCN HMMCCN which contains an overlay mapping structure to store the old-to-new name binding relationship and perform the mobility management for mobile devices. This allows for efficient simultaneous mobility and supports seamless handoff for interactive communication. The main goals of this paper are: a to propose a mobility scheme suitable for all mobile nodes in CCN, both the publishers and subscribers; b to describe the hierarchical mobility management procedure during intra-domain and inter-domain handoff; c to establish an analytical model and formulate the location update signalling cost, handoff delay; d to calculate k

HMMCCN: a hierarchical mobility management scheme for content-centric networking

Content-centric networking (CCN) has emerged as a promising paradigm in current internet. Owing to the interest-driven, we concern more about the content itself rather than the place it located, and therefore, CCN supports subscriber mobility natively, however, it remains a major challenge in publisher mobility. In this paper, we propose a hierarchical mobility management scheme for CCN (HMMCCN) which contains an overlay mapping structure to store the old-to-new name binding relationship and perform the mobility management for mobile devices. This allows for efficient simultaneous mobility and supports seamless handoff for interactive communication. The main goals of this paper are: a) to propose a mobility scheme suitable for all mobile nodes in CCN, both the publishers and subscribers; b) to describe the hierarchical mobility management procedure during intra-domain and inter-domain handoff; c) to establish an analytical model and formulate the location update signalling cost, handoff delay; d) to calculate kopt in the content router (CR) for decreasing the total overhead during handoff.

Mobility management in HetNets: a learning-based perspective

Heterogeneous networks (HetNets) are expected to be a key feature of long-term evolution (LTE)-advanced networks and beyond and are essential for providing ubiquitous broadband user throughput. However, due to different coverage ranges of base stations (BSs) in HetNets, the handover performance of a user equipment (UE) may be significantly degraded, especially in scenarios where high-velocity UE traverse through small cells. In this article, we propose a context-aware mobility management (MM) procedure for small cell networks, which uses reinforcement learning techniques and inter-cell coordination for improving the handover and throughput performance of UE. In particular, the BSs jointly learn their long-term traffic loads and optimal cell range expansion and schedule their UE based on their velocities and historical data rates that are exchanged among the tiers. The proposed approach is shown not only to outperform the classical MM in terms of throughput but also to enable better fairness. Using the proposed learning-based MM approaches, the UE throughput is shown to improve by 80% on the average, while the handover failure probability is shown to reduce up to a factor of three.

Modeling and Evaluation in an Interworking of WLAN and WiMAX Network

The complementary characteristics of Worldwide Interoperability for Microwave Access (WiMAX) and IEEE 802.11 Wireless Local Area Network (WLAN) networks make them attractive for integration to offer the best of both technologies. However, in order to make the integration effective, the in-depth mobility study by simulation is necessary. This paper addresses the simulation models for mobility management procedures in an interworking of WiMAX and WLAN network for the various integration scenarios. The mobile multihomed node models of WiMAX and WLAN interfaces are developed and simulated in various traffic environments and network integration topologies including group mobility and MANET. The simulation results show that the developed models are useful for mobility studies in various integration wireless networks.

A New Network Selection Procedure Using Access Networks Consent

The paper proposes a new network selection procedure using access networks consent. The proposed mechanism supports WLAN, WIMAX and 3G networks. Using mobility prediction model coupled with GIS information system the access networks at future location of mobile terminal. Using pre handover mechanisms with EAP HO NS and AAA extensions proposed in this paper the home access networks negotiate with visiting access networks and networks entities to allocate and reserve resources for accommodating mobile terminals enabling the solution proposed is efficient. Using these mechanisms the mobile terminal mobility can be handled efficiently in any access networks. The proposed solution addresses all the issues that are raised by network selection procedures. As a part of our future work we are coupling this mechanism with security, mobility and handover management procedures to control and provide seamless handover during roaming.

A solution for transparent mobility with route optimization in the IP multimedia subsystem

This paper presents TRIM+, an architecture for transparent mobility management with route optimization in IMS based networks. The design of our architecture is based on a previous work referred to as TRIM. TRIM was originally devised to provide transparent mobility support in the IMS, although transparency came at the cost of using a suboptimal data path between communicating end points. TRIM+ maintains transparency as a design criterium, and thus end-user applications, running at the mobile node and its correspondent communication peers, are unaware of mobility management procedures. Additionally, the proposed design defines a set of route optimization procedures, allowing compliant devices to use the optimal data path for media communications. Furthermore, TRIM+ addresses packet loss management in scenarios where the media path cannot be maintained during the handover of the MN. To this end, our architecture enables the MN to request buffering capacity in its home network to temporarily store incoming media traffic during the handover, which would otherwise be dropped. This mechanism, as well as route optimization procedures, are executed transparently to the end-user applications running at the communicating end points. As a proof-of-concept, we have implemented a software prototype of the TRIM+ architecture, deploying it over a real IMS testbed. By means of a set of experiments, we have validated the mechanisms proposed in this paper, considering both UDP and TCP user traffic.

Mobility Support for IPv6-based Next Generation Wireless Networks

This paper presents an overview of IPv6-based mobility management protocols: mobile IPv6 (MIPv6), fast handovers for mobile IPv6 (FMIPv6), hierarchical mobile IPv6 (HMIPv6), and fast handover for hierarchical mobile IPv6 (F-HMIPv6). All these protocols play an important role in the next generation wireless networks, because in such networks, mobile users need to be freely change their access network or domain with on-going real-time multimedia services. The mobility management procedure for each protocol is described in details. Furthermore, handover performance is compared for host-based mobility protocols using analytical modeling. The effect of various wireless network parameters on the performance is studied carefully. Numerical analysis shows that handoff performance in wireless networks is largely dependent on various system parameters such as the user velocity, subnet radius, and session-to-mobility ratio, domain size and binding lifetime; there is a trade-off between performance metrics and such parameters.

Improving Slow-start based probing mechanisms for flow adaptation after handovers

In a heterogeneous mobile networking environment, when a mobile user needs to perform a handover and switch to a new network, besides all the mobility management procedures to keep its connections alive and divert its on-going flows to the new location, the transmission rate of these flows should also be correctly adapted to match the conditions of the new network. One of the common practices is to let the flows to go through a fresh new Slow-start (or its variants) phase to probe along the path between the new location of the mobile user and its correspondent for the appropriate rate. Unfortunately, in many situations packets from these flows will be leaked into the new path at the old rate already before the Slow-start probing is performed, which not only interferes with the probing process but also disturbs the new network and affects the cross traffic along the new path. In this paper we propose to introduce some intelligence into the network, more specifically onto the mobility agent, so that this packet leaking issue is well taken care of before and during the Slow-start probing. On the other hand, with the introduced intelligence the probing process can also be improved in the sense of promptness, speed and data throughput, and these improvements are clearly demonstrated by simulation results.