Mobility Management Solutions Research Articles

Challenges and opportunities in achieving secure hospital clinical mobility management: An illustrative use case

Objective: To qualitatively describe a use case at Yale New Haven Health System (YNHHS) illustrating the need for and effective deployment of innovative technologies to manage an enterprise-owned shared device (EOSD) management program. EOSD management provides clinicians with secure, rapid access to enterprise mobile devices and applications, maintains devices in functional, use ready condition for clinicians, and enables enterprise tracking and reduced loss of devices.Methods: Executive leaders in clinical information technology and informatics management at YNHHS were interviewed through written and telephonic communication. Qualitative data was gathered through communications between clinical and information technology executives and the implementation support team of a leading identity and access management (IAM) solutions and EOSD management solution provider. Use case information was gathered, integrated and shared with health system executives and health IT/informatics leaders to verify the description of unmet needs, solution objectives and impact/value delivered after implementation of the EOSD management solution.Results: Benefits realized from implementation of an enterprise-shared mobility management solution included establishment of a cohesive and comprehensive enterprise-owned, shared device management strategy. This included effective monitoring and dynamic management of the system’s mobile device fleet, and better IT resource management with reduced mobile device loss. The IT administrative burden was reduced. While not surveyed systematically, improved clinician experience and satisfaction were reported to IT leaders anecdotally. EOSD management solution deployment was rapid, as was the time to improved clinician mobile experience and clear demonstration of value.Conclusions: A leading US health system was able to rapidly deploy a shared mobile device management solution that enabled effective monitoring and dynamic management of the enterprise mobile device fleet, with easier and faster clinician device access and workflows, and reduced IT administrative demand and costs. While the complexities associated with increased clinical mobility in healthcare will likely continue to grow, issuing future device and mobile management challenges that require effective hospital system response, technologies have emerged that enable more effective, efficient and satisfactory organizational mobility performance.

Advancing producer mobility management in Named Data Networking: A comprehensive analytical model

This paper introduces a transformative approach to managing producer mobility in Named Data Networking (NDN). It presents a novel analytical model known as Producer Mobility Management Model (PMMM) that significantly improves handoff latency, signalling cost, and packet delivery efficiency, overcoming limitations of traditional static anchor-based methods. This model serves as an extension of well-established theories drawn from existing literature, thus offering an advanced approach towards managing producer mobility. The model provides the dynamic mobility management solution to adapt to efficiently manage producer movements, ensuring optimal routing and efficient network performance. Comparative evaluations demonstrate marked advancements over existing solutions, establishing the model as a scalable and robust solution for NDN environments that solves high handoff latency, excessive signalling and long packet delivery issues. This work not only addresses current challenges in producer mobility but also sets a new direction for future research and practical applications in NDN architecture.

A study of routing-based distributed mobility management in supporting seamless data transmission in smart cities

<p>The current trend of people having their multimedia-capable wireless and mobile devices roam within highly urbanized areas (i.e., smart cities) has led to the wide deployment of overlapping heterogeneous wireless network technologies. In this regard, various challenges have emerged, such as the number of mobile devices that connect or disconnect a wireless network domain, the diversity of time of their connections, frequent handovers as mobile devices frequently change their locations, the heterogeneity of wireless network technologies, cooperation challenges between the overlapping heterogeneous wireless network technologies, the increasing volume of multimedia traffic, security and privacy issues, and many more. This paper focuses on the deployment of a routing-based distributed mobility management (DMM) scheme to address the constraints and limitations of centralized wireless architectures for smart cities. The comparative analysis with centralized mobility management solutions shows significant alleviation in performance as to handover latency and packet losses, thus providing seamless handovers to maintain quality of service (QoS) for multimedia services.</p>

Awareness of user mobility in Named Data Networking for IoT traffic under the push communication mode

The current proliferation of Internet of Things (IoT) mobile devices has helped to show the limitations of the IP model to support content-based applications and networking. Named Data Networking (NDN) appears to be more in line with the IoT framework and vision. However, NDN still lacks native integration of effective user mobility management to meet the requirements of various latency-sensitive applications such as real-time streaming and embraces the continued proliferation of smart phones and mobile devices.In this paper, we first propose to integrate a push communication model into NDN to better suit real time streaming applications. We propose the use of persistent interests (PI) to create a streaming like capability in NDN and significantly reduce the interests traffic within the network. Producer and consumer mobility handling for seamless and continuous data flows becomes a real challenging issue under the PI framework. We propose PIMM a radically new anchorless mobility management approach for NDN. PIMM integrates efficient mechanisms for the mobility of both producer and consumer, and sustains high mobility environments as well as requirements of latency sensitive applications.PIMM is implemented in the de facto NDN simulator (ndnSIM2.1), evaluated and benchmarked with existing NDN producer mobility management solutions. Simulations results clearly show the efficiency of PIMM and highlight its superiority in terms of handoff latency, data loss, and data delay jitter.

Smart Cities and Intelligent Transport Systems

The integration of technology into cities and transportation networks has the potential to improve the quality of life for residents, reduce congestion and pollution, and increase the overall efficiency of urban cities and their transportation system. Smart cities use technology to improve the efficiency and sustainability of urban areas. This can include things like smart lighting, the internet of things (IoT), energy management, artificial intelligence and smart transportation systems. An intelligent transport system is a component of a smart city that uses technology, to improve the efficiency and safety of the transportation network. This can include things like traffic management systems, real-time passenger information, and intelligent traffic signals. Together all smart cities and ITS can help to reduce congestion, improve air quality, and make cities more liable to residents. Intelligent transport systems (ITS) can revolutionise the way people commute in metro cities. ITS offer a wide range of approaches to providing multiple transportation types, advanced infrastructure, and traffic mobility management solutions. It uses several electronics, wireless and communication technologies to provide consumers with access to a smarter, safer, and fast way to travel around the city

Future Prospects and Challenges of On-Demand Mobility Management Solutions

Future Prospects and Challenges of On-Demand Mobility Management Solutions

The Challenges and Compatibility of Mobility Management Solutions for Future Networks

Wireless network devices can attain the required level of quality of service (QoS) and maintain connectivity even after detaching from a current point of access. This detachment (mobility) requires various mobility management (MM) mechanisms, which present numerous challenges due to the exponential growth of wireless devices and the demands of users. The network must be heterogeneous and dense to manage such a heightened escalation of network traffic, increased number of devices, and different types of user demands. Such factors will seriously challenge MM solutions, eventually making the networks non-feasible from the dependability, adaptability, extensibility, and power consumption points of view. Therefore, novel perspectives on MM mechanisms are desired for 5G networks and beyond. This paper introduces an innovative discussion of the functional requirements of MM mechanisms for advanced wireless networks. We present comprehensive arguments on whether the prevailing mechanisms perceived by standard bodies attempt to fulfill the stated requirements. We complete this discussion through innovative qualitative evaluation. We assess each of the discussed mechanisms in terms of their capability to fulfill the dependability, adaptability, extensibility, and power consumption benchmarks for upcoming MM schemes. Hereafter, we demonstrate the outcome and the identified gaps/challenges for the planning and deployment of 5G MM frameworks and beyond. Next, we present the capabilities and possible MM solutions to tackle the gaps/difficulties. We complete our discussion by proposing a 6G MM architecture based on defined parameters.

Network Mobility Management Challenges, Directions, and Solutions: An Architectural Perspective

Efficient mobility management solutions are essential to provide users with seamless connectivity and session continuity during movement. However, user mobility was not envisaged as one of the early Internet’s use cases due to the early adoption of destination based routing and the assumption that end-nodes are static. This has become a critical hinder for providing efficient mobility support. This paper presents the challenges, drivers, and solutions that aim to overcome the drawbacks of current mobility management approaches. Furthermore, it introduces a promising solution that builds on emerging path-based forwarding architectures that identify network links rather than end nodes. Delivery path information is stored inside the packet while forwarding is achieved by performing a simple set membership test rather than the current destination-based routing approach. Mobility management in these architectures simply requires partial recomputation of the delivery path allowing for efficient mobility support over an optimal path. Evaluation results show significant cost savings in terms of delivery paths and end-to-end packet delay when using a path forwarding architecture.

Global IoT Mobility: A Path Based Forwarding Approach

With the huge proliferation of mobile Internet of Things (IoT) devices such as connected vehicles, drones, and healthcare wearables, IoT networks are promising mobile connectivity capacity far beyond the conventional computing platforms. The success of this service provisioning is highly dependent on the flexibility offered by such enabling technologies to support IoT mobility using different devices and protocol stacks. Many of the connected mobile IoT devices are autonomous, and resource constrained, which poses additional challenges for mobile IoT communication. Therefore, given the unique mobility requirements of IoT devices and applications, many challenges are still to be addressed. This paper presents a global mobility management solution for IoT networks that can handle both micro and macro mobility scenarios. The solution exploits a path-based forwarding fabric together with mechanisms from Information-Centric Networking. The solution is equally suitable for legacy session-based mobile devices and emerging information-based IoT devices such as mobile sensors. Simulation evaluations have shown minimum overhead in terms of packet delivery and signalling costs to support macro mobility handover across different IoT domains.

Mobility Management Issues and Solutions in 5G-and-Beyond Networks: A Comprehensive Review

The fully accomplished standardization of the new mobile generation has led to the deployment of fifth-generation (5G) wireless networks to gratify enormous traffic volume for Internet services. The current centralized mobility system could not be sufficient to manage an explosive increase in data volume and is considered a steadily rising issue in modern wireless communication. A new technique that can affluently handle traffic problems and completely avoid network breakdown chances is indispensable. Recently, distributed mobility management (DMM) was introduced to overcome the inevitable obstacles that destructively impact the existing networks. Specifically, a novel design based on the deployment of distributed mobility anchors, closer to the terminal points, was introduced. Several works have been proposed to build DMM solutions with different focuses for 5G-and-beyond networks (B5G), which are also referred to as sixth-generation solutions (6G). In this paper, we present the potential and benefits of flat network design for efficient and fast routing of traffic and furnish the effectiveness of the scheme toward mobility management in B5G by delineating recent research works. We also present the current limitations, challenges, and future research directions for seamless mobility to achieve the desired objectives in the current 5G and upcoming 6G cellular communications.

Determinants of Mobility Management in Higher Education: Evidence from Vietnam

Academic mobility is a popular phenomenon at universities, particularly for promoting knowledge exchange, attracts the attention scientific community in recent years, especially in the context of integration and The Fourth Industrial Revolution (FIR). Indeed, FIR is place convergency many dimensions that make mobility flows at universities more advantageous with unlimited connection and interactions, including virtual space and digital tools for mobility. The paper aims at exploring the key determinants of mobility management in higher education to respond to the impacts of FIR. The conceptual model of this study emphasizes mobility management of high-quality human resources following their contribution process: attraction/recruitment, contribution onsite, and return. The model also shows that both individuals and universities have common and unique interests in enhancing mobility flows while creating knowledge transfer regions. It is important to combine these benefits to create active mobility flows. By analyzing some typical mobility flows in a Vietnam national university Hanoi case study, we emphasized that the current philosophy of Vietnamese universities is mostly to focus on solving the lost mobility flows (brain drain) instead of going hand-in-hand with managing the value of high-quality human resource mobility and connecting networks to make to promote knowledge exchange. Thus, it requires Vietnamese universities should change for adapt to FIR’s impacts with academic mobility and manage mobility of human resources follow all their contribution process. This study explores these topics for their impact on FIR to manage mobility flows of high-quality human resources using assessment data which collected snowball methods. Finally, the paper proposes the policy framework supporting mobility management and priority solutions for promoting the knowledge interactions zones and developing smart platforms for university governance and human resource management adapting with the context of the FIR.

SDMob: SDN-Based Mobility Management for IoT Networks

Internet-of-Things (IoT) applications are envisaged to evolve to support mobility of devices while providing quality of service in the system. To keep the connectivity of the constrained nodes upon topological changes, it is of vital importance to enhance the standard protocol stack, including the Routing Protocol for Lossy Low-power Networks (RPL), with accurate and real-time control decisions. We argue that devising a centralized mobility management solution based on a lightweight Software Defined Networking (SDN) controller provides seamless handoff with reasonable communication overhead. A centralized controller can exploit its global view of the network, computation capacity, and flexibility, to predict and significantly improve the responsiveness of the network. This approach requires the controller to be fed with the required input and to get involved in the distributed operation of the standard RPL. We present SDMob, which is a lightweight SDN-based mobility management architecture that integrates an external controller within a constrained IoT network. SDMob lifts the burden of computation-intensive filtering algorithms away from the resource-constrained nodes to achieve seamless handoffs upon nodes’ mobility. The current work extends our previous work, by supporting multiple mobile nodes, networks with a high density of anchors, and varying hop-distance from the controller, as well as harsh and realistic mobility patterns. Through analytical modeling and simulations, we show that SDMob outperforms the baseline RPL and the state-of-the-art ARMOR in terms of packet delivery ratio and end-to-end delay, with an adjustable and tolerable overhead. With SDMob, the network provides close to 100% packet delivery ratio (PDR) for a limited number of mobile nodes, and maintains sub-meter accuracy in localization under random mobility patterns and varying network topologies.

An MIH-enhanced fully distributed mobility management (MF-DMM) solution for real and non-real time CVBR traffic classes in mobile internet

The integration of wireless access networks has progressed rapidly in recent years. Within the mobile communication environment, the operator provides multiple interface options for the mobile node (MN) to switch its connection to any access network during mobility to achieve the quality of service (QoS) for various traffic classes. The conventional centralised mobility management (CMM) scheme lacks reliability, dynamic anchoring and a single point of failure. This stimulates the distributed mobility management (DMM) scheme to handle mobility at the access network rather in a centralised manner. Therefore, in this paper, an IEEE 802.21 media independent handover (MIH) enhanced fully DMM (MF-DMM) solution is proposed for real- and non-real-time constant and variable bit rate (CVBR) traffic classes for mobile internetworking applications. The performance factors of handover delay, packet loss rate, throughput and signalling overheads are compared with the existing CMM scheme. The simulation results prove that the presented MF-DMM technique considerably reduces the handover delay while switching to different access technologies and, thus, achieves seamless connection by managing mobile internet protocol (IP) traffic locally.

Optimized seamless handover scheme with information and decision server‐assisted partially distributed mobility management in heterogeneous 5th generation wireless networks

SummaryExisting mobile network architectures are flatter and employ a centralized mobility management (CMM) scheme, where the entire intelligence is focused on the single‐end, which leads to low scalability, lack of dynamic mobility support, suboptimal routing, and insufficiency to support large volumes of data. The fifth‐generation (5G) networks demand high‐speed seamless connections to the best‐connected network irrespective of user position and connectivity. Further, seamless handover has to be carried out between wireless local area network (WLAN), worldwide interoperability for microwave access (WiMAX), universal mobile telecommunication system (UMTS), and long‐term evolution (LTE). This paper aims to propose a distributed mobility management (DMM) solution in order to bring the mobility anchor point nearer to the mobile node (MN) to support the acceptable quality of service (QoS) and quality of experience (QoE) provision to end users. An information and decision server (IDS)‐based partial DMM scheme (IDS‐PDMM) is suggested to support optimized handover in internet protocol (IP)‐based heterogeneous architecture. The IDS estimates the nearest candidate network for MN during handover and thus provides a seamless connection for delay‐sensitive applications. The performance of the presented approach is compared with the existing CMM scheme and the simulation results prove that the IDS‐PDMM efficiently minimizes the handover delay and packet loss rate with guaranteed QoS provision.

Multi-User Small Base Station Association via Contextual Combinatorial Volatile Bandits

We propose an efficient mobility management solution to the problem of assigning small base stations (SBSs) to multiple mobile data users in a heterogeneous setting. We formalize the problem using a novel sequential decision-making model named contextual combinatorial volatile multi-armed bandits (MABs), in which each association is considered as an arm, volatility of an arm is imposed by the dynamic arrivals of the users, and context is the additional information linked with the user and the SBS such as user/SBS distance and the transmission frequency. As the next-generation communications are envisioned to take place over highly dynamic links such as the millimeter wave (mmWave) frequency band, we consider the association problem over an unknown channel distribution with a limited feedback in the form of acknowledgments and under the absence of channel state information (CSI). As the links are unknown and dynamically varying, the assignment problem cannot be solved offline. Thus, we propose an online algorithm which is able to solve the user-SBS association problem in a multi-user and time-varying environment, where the number of users dynamically varies over time. Our algorithm strikes the balance between exploration and exploitation and achieves sublinear in time regret with an optimal dependence on the problem structure and the dynamics of user arrivals and departures. In addition, we demonstrate via numerical experiments that our algorithm achieves significant performance gains compared to several benchmark algorithms.

Integrating IP Mobility Management Protocols and MANET: A Survey

The Mobile ad hoc Network (MANET) is a collection of mobile devices that forms a self-created, self-administered, and self-organized network. It is an infrastructureless network that does not require an existing infrastructure to operate. MANET suits scenarios where a temporary network is needed, such as emergency rescue, the military field, and disaster areas. MANET is an isolated network, and communication is restricted to the participating nodes’ transmission coverage. In order to increase its connectivity and its application scope, however, MANET requires integration with other networks, forming a hybrid MANET. The integration of MANET and IP networks raises many challenges and issues. Mobility management is one of the main challenges. Traditional mobility management protocols provide seamless mobility in a single hop infrastructure network. Consequently, mobile nodes can maintain their global connectivity without interrupting the ongoing sessions. Mobility management becomes more challenging in a network that relies on multi-hop communication, such as MANET. This paper presents a survey of the use of mobility management systems when integrating MANET with the internet, with the objective of serving as a handy reference in this field of research. It presents, analyzes, and discusses existing mobility management solutions for integrated MANET networks. It also investigates their shortcomings and provides a comparative study of the surveyed proposals.

A Seamless Mobility Management Protocol in 5G Locator Identificator Split Dense Small Cells

Network densification with Small Cells (SCs) has emerged as a key technique to increase the 5G network capacity. However, in a densified network, fast mobile nodes will experience frequent handovers with a high signaling load, handover latency, and packet loss, due to the short cell radius. Indeed, Distributed Mobility Management (DMM) protocols aim to solve the shortcomings of centralized mobility management solutions such as poor scalability and non-optimal routing. However, when the cell residence time is short, DMM protocols might suffer from increased costs and limited performance. This paper proposes a localized mobility management protocol in 5G dense SCs, based on the locator identifier separation protocol, local mobility anchoring, and fast handovers concepts. The proposed scheme divides a local domain into several location service areas, each controlled by a local anchor. We provide the analytical models of several handover metrics, namely the average total signaling cost, the data delivery cost, the handover latency, and the packet loss. Numerical and simulation results show significant cost savings, up to 30 percent in signaling overhead, up to 53 percent of packet loss, and up to 90 percent of processing load reduction at the core of the network compared to the existing lisp mobile node protocol.

Proactive Mobility Management With Trajectory Prediction Based on Virtual Cells in Ultra-Dense Networks

Ultra-dense networking (UDN) is a promising technology to improve the network capacity in the next-generation mobile communication system. The virtualization paradigm is tightly integrated into UDN to address the problem of interference management. However, mobility management based on virtual cells meets significant challenges in UDN due to the frequent handovers and massive signaling overhead. These problems become severe for vehicles owing to their high-speed movement. In this paper, driven by trajectory prediction using a real-world vehicle mobility dataset, we propose a proactive mobility management solution based on virtual cells. Four modules are designed in the centralized Software-Defined Networking controller to support the proposed solution. The proposed LSTM-DR framework predicts the next locations of vehicles by integrating Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) networks and Dead Reckoning (DR) method. The active gNBs selection algorithm selects the serving gNBs to form virtual cells according to predicted locations and mobility preferences. The corresponding signaling procedure is then carefully designed to further reduce the signaling overhead. Simulation results show that the proposed prediction framework can achieve higher accuracy and robustness in trajectory prediction. The proposed proactive solution reduces the handover frequency and handover failure rate and thereby saves the handover signaling overhead significantly.

Towards user-centric, market-driven mobility management of road traffic using permit-based schemes

We study the problem of managing traffic on single-bottleneck roadways using a mobility permit (MP)-based method—a scheme that becomes increasingly relevant to shape the new mobility culture. To identify the main concerns of the involved stakeholders, we present an integrated framework that embeds our MP-based traffic management scheme, in which the mobility permit users are allowed to choose the options best matching their travel needs. Furthermore, to find the most effective market prices, the proposed permit allocation approach is integrated into an iterative auction process to achieve the best equilibrium state in terms of permit prices that is suitable for users, mitigating potential efficiency loss. Our computational results indicate the effectiveness of the proposed scheme as an alternative solution for permit-based mobility management on single-bottleneck roadways.

Media independent solution for mobility management in heterogeneous LPWAN technologies

The integration of IoT communication technologies such as Low Power Wide Area Networks (LPWAN) is essential in today systems including supply chain, healthcare, autonomous vehicle, etc. In such environments there is an increase in IoT applications that require End Devices (EDs) mobility within similar or heterogeneous LPWAN technologies. Supporting mobility refers to ensure the delivery of data on demand and during movement. In this paper, we investigate the mobility of ED between different LPWAN technologies. We propose a new mobility management solution in LPWAN to achieve continuity of the communication after the link layer technology changes between the ED and the Application Server (AS). This solution is IPv6-based and supports switching between heterogeneous LPWAN networks and technologies. It results in reducing the time required to deliver the data by optimizing the communication routing and saving the bandwidth. The validation of the proposed solution is achieved through the scenarios of ED handovers between LoRaWAN and NB-IoT using simulations as well as experimentation.