Mobility Management Solutions Research Articles

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.

Analytical and Experimental Evaluation of a Novel Mechanism to Improve the Control Plane in Next-Generation Mobile Networks

With the continuous development of mobile communications and the Internet of Things technology, the enhanced network performance can be seen as one of the major challenges in the fourth industrial revolution context, where new services and applications with strict performance requirements have emerged, such as driverless vehicles, smart cities, factories, and manufacturing, among others. These new services and applications also drive growth of the data traffic, which is increasing exponentially. Thus, in mobile network environments, industry and academia are proposing new mechanisms to overcome the traffic bottlenecks and reduce the signaling overhead that affects current networks. Centralized Mobility Management solutions are prone to several problems such as the aforementioned signaling overhead or scalability issues. To overcome these limitations, Distributed Mobility Management approaches are being considered. In this paper, an analytical cost model and experimental evaluation will be developed for evaluating the performance of the Distributed Mobility Management implementations. Furthermore, a new approach will be proposed to improve network performance.

An analytical framework for distributed and centralized mobility management protocols

Proxy Mobile IPv6 (PMIPv6) maintains the mobility management of mobile users without involving them in the signaling of mobility process. The main limitations of PMIPv6 are the high latency and packet loss. Consequently, IETF has addressed these limitations by standardizing Fast Handover for Proxy Mobile IPv6 (PFMIPv6) protocols. The whole processes of PMIPv6 and PFMIPv6 protocols, including mobility management and connectivity needs, are based on a centralized and static mobility anchor. Therefore, the centralized anchor usually suffers from enormous burdens and hence degradation in performance, scalability, and reliability of the network. Lately, Distributed Mobility Management (DMM) solution is introduced based on PMPv6 to tackle the issue of relying on a single entity. Analyzing and investigating the performance of these centralized and distributed solutions depends on traffic characteristics and user mobility model. Accordingly, we propose through these two factors an analytical framework to evaluate the handover performance of PMIPv6, PFMIPv6 and DMM in vehicular environment. Our analysis and experimental validation are very significant to determine the impacts of different network parameters on the handover performance of these protocols to facilitate decision making on which analytical framework must be adopted in a network. Analytical results demonstrate that there is a trade-off between network parameters and handover performance metrics. PFMIPv6 is the most suited protocol for low to high mobility scenarios in term of handover performance.

Key Challenges, Drivers and Solutions for Mobility Management in 5G Networks: A Survey

Ensuring a seamless connection during the mobility of various User Equipments (UEs) will be one of the major challenges facing the practical implementation of the Fifth Generation (5G) networks and beyond. Several key determinants will significantly contribute to numerous mobility challenges. One of the most important determinants is the use of millimeter waves (mm-waves) as it is characterized by high path loss. The inclusion of various types of small coverage Base Stations (BSs), such as Picocell, Femtocell and drone-based BSs is another challenge. Other issues include the use of Dual Connectivity (DC), Carrier Aggregation (CA), the massive growth of mobiles connections, network diversity, the emergence of connected drones (as BS or UE), ultra-dense network, inefficient optimization processes, central optimization operations, partial optimization, complex relation in optimization operations, and the use of inefficient handover decision algorithms. The relationship between these processes and diverse wireless technologies can cause growing concerns in relation to handover associated with mobility. The risk becomes critical with high mobility speed scenarios. Therefore, mobility issues and their determinants must be efficiently addressed. This paper aims to provide an overview of mobility management in 5G networks. The work examines key factors that will significantly contribute to the increase of mobility issues. Furthermore, the innovative, advanced, efficient, and smart handover techniques that have been introduced in 5G networks are discussed. The study also highlights the main challenges facing UEs' mobility as well as future research directions on mobility management in 5G networks and beyond.

A Comprehensive Survey on Mobility Management in 5G Heterogeneous Networks: Architectures, Challenges and Solutions

With the rapid increase in the number of mobile users, wireless access technologies are evolving to provide mobile users with high data rates and support new applications that include both human and machine-type communications. Heterogeneous networks (HetNets), created by the joint installation of macro cells and a large number of densely deployed small cells, are considered an important solution to deal with the increasing network capacity demands and provide high coverage to wireless users in future fifth generation (5G) wireless networks. Due to the increasing complexity of network topology in 5G HetNets with the integration of many different base station types, in 5G architecture mobility management has many challenges. Intense deployment of small cells, along with many advantages it provides, brings important mobility management problems such as frequent handover (HO), HO failure, HO delays, ping-pong HO and high energy consumption which will result in lower user experience and heavy signal loads. In this paper, we provide a comprehensive study on the mobility management in 5G HetNet in terms of radio resource control, the initial access and registration procedure of the user equipment (UE) to the network, the paging procedure that provides the location of the UE within the network, connected mode mobility management schemes, beam level mobility and beam management. Besides, this paper addresses the challenges and suggest possible solutions for the 5G mobility management.

Is Your Android App Insecure? Patching Security Functions With Dynamic Policy Based on a Java Reflection Technique

With the popularization of smart devices, companies are adopting bring-your-own-device or mobile office policies that utilize personal smart devices for work. However, as work data are stored on individual smart devices, critical security threats are emerging, such as the leakage of confidential documents. Enterprises want to address this issue by adapting enterprise mobility management (EMM) solutions. Appwrapping is among the core technologies in EMM solutions, enabling security function insertion or misused code patching without the original application (app) source code. Studies on permission control, misused code patching, security function insertion based on static policies, etc., have been conducted, but there are limitations such as poor user convenience and overhead. In this paper, we propose an AppWrapper toolkit to support dynamic polices. Basically it can insert security function execution code into apps by using appwrapping technology without the original source code. This code uses Java reflection to invoke security functions dynamically based on preset policies. Accordingly, after the initial appwrapping, the policy can be changed easily. In addition, even when multiple security functions are required, Java reflection can invoke multiple security functions dynamically and simultaneously without conflicting with the existing code. The AppWrapper toolkit also provides a log function to check in real time where the security function is needed. Hence, the policy-setting administrator can check the log in real time and implement the security function where needed. Our experimental results show that this technique improves significantly the efficiency, effectiveness, and convenience of adding security function execution code.

Mobility Management Challenges and Solutions in Mobile Cloud Computing System for Next Generation Networks

As of late, there is a dynamic improvement in the field of mobile computing, and mobile cloud computing (MCC) has been familiar with a potential development for portable administrations. Likewise, the mobile phones and their applications have high framework in the administration at any point and grow more rapidly. Again, MCC is depended upon to deliver on a very basic level increasingly inventive with multi applications. Moreover, Mobile handling incorporates versatile equipments, portable correspondence, cell programming, and right now there are various compact cloud applications. Versatility the board for supporting the area following and area based assistance is a significant issue of savvy city by giving the way to the smooth transportation of individuals and products. The mobility is valuable to contribute the development in both open and private transportation frameworks for keen urban communities. As the information is distributed computing and getting to it with cell phones all the exchanges experience the system so it is powerless against assault. For keeping the utilization of this fundamental apparatus of steady in this development world we are giving a portion of the answers for these difficulties to address in the field of MCC. In this paper, the main challenges faced by the enterprises and their corresponding solutions are discussed with the mobile cloud computing.

DMM-SEP: Secure and Efficient Protocol for Distributed Mobility Management Based on 5G Networks

In the 5G era, network mobility management is recognized as a very important factor for user service availability. Especially, due to fast speed and shrinking cell coverage, frequent handover is expected than before. Hence, efficient handover procedure is essential to guarantee seamless service to users. Distributed IP Mobility Management (DMM), a major mobility management solution, is a flat architecture that achieves efficiency and fault tolerance by excluding a centralized anchor and minimizing the distance between a mobile device and its serving network. However, DMM, which has no dominant security scheme specified to itself, is excessively dependent on the security of Layer 2 and is vulnerable to various threats. Especially, the existing security schemes are still venerable to redirection attacks launched by malicious Mobile Access Gateways (MAGs) or Control Mobility Database (CMD). Motivated by this, we proposed a DMM-based handover security protocol that can support privacy and defend against redirection attacks in addition to providing essential security properties such as confidentiality, integrity, mutual authentication, and key exchange. The proposed protocol was formally verified to be correct through AVISPA and BAN logic. Moreover, the comparison analysis showed that the proposed protocol is better than the previous studies and standards.

A Dynamic MAP Discovery and Selection Scheme for Predictive Hierarchical MIPv6 in Vehicular Networks

Recent developments and the ubiquitous availability of wireless technologies and inter-vehicle communication systems are anticipated to lead to the evolution of heterogeneous wireless networks. Based on standards such as the IEEE 802.11, 5G and WiMax, coupled with mobile IP for the content delivery of road safety and infotainment services to drivers over the new generation of vehicular networks. However, the performance of traditional mobility management protocols over vehicular networks is affected by network topology changes and vehicles' high mobility. Therefore, efficient mobility management solution that mitigates the challenges of vehicles' mobility is needed. In this paper, we present an adaptive mobility management protocol for predictive hierarchical mobile IPv6 in vehicular networks. We develop a dynamic Mobility Anchor Point (MAP) discovery and selection scheme that adjusts the network topology structure to fit the vehicles' mobility environment better. Moreover, the predictive handover scheme is based on a multi-observation hidden Markov model, which utilizes the vehicles' movement projections to estimate the subsequent point of access. The performance of our proposed protocol has been tested using NS-2 and several real and synthetic mobility traces. The results indicate that our protocol exhibits better performance results when compared to well-known handover protocols in reducing the handover latency and packet loss.

Management Capabilities for Mobile and IoT Devices: An Evaluation Framework

recent experienceindicates that mobile and connected devices are increasingly becoming a key enabler of advanced services and applications. Specifically in the case of the enterprise, they represent a land of opportunities to grow in efficiency and quality with reduced costs and time-to-market. However, mobile and IoT also exposes enterprises to new challenges, such as security and safety risks, scale, heterogeneity, resources constraints, or context fluctuations. This paper introduces an evaluation framework that elicits the needed capabilities to enroll, control, and manage mobile and IoT devices, towards properly integrating them with the organization workflow, in accordance with internal policies. To demonstrate the usability of the framework, the paper presents a comprehensive review of Enterprise Mobility Management (EMM) and Unified Endpoint Management (UEM) solutions. A preliminary evaluation is conducted with various companies to prove the framework’s relevance, ease of use and completeness.

Management Capabilities for Mobile and IoT Devices: An Evaluation Framework

Recent experience indicates that mobile and connected devices are increasingly becoming a key enabler of advanced services and applications. Specifically in the case of the enterprise, they represent a land of opportunities to grow in efficiency and quality with reduced costs and time-to-market. However, mobile and IoT also exposes enterprises to new challenges, such as security and safety risks, scale, heterogeneity, resources constraints, or context fluctuations. This paper introduces an evaluation framework that elicits the needed capabilities to enroll, control, and manage mobile and IoT devices, towards properly integrating them with the organization workflow, in accordance with internal policies. To demonstrate the usability of the framework, the paper presents a comprehensive review of Enterprise Mobility Management (EMM) and Unified Endpoint Management (UEM) solutions. A preliminary evaluation is conducted with various companies to prove the framework’s relevance, ease of use and completeness.

Towards a software-based mobility management for 5G: An experimental approach for flattened network architectures

The number of mobile subscribers, as well as the data traffic generated by them, is increasing exponentially with the growth of wireless smart devices and the number of network services that they can support. This significant growth is pushing mobile network operators towards new solutions to improve their network performance and efficiency. Thus, the appearance of Software Defined Networking (SDN) can overcome the limitations of current deployments through decoupling the network control plane from the data plane, allowing higher flexibility and programmability to the network. In this context, the process of handling user mobility becomes an essential part of future mobile networks. Taking advantage of the benefits that SDN brings, in this article we present a novel mobility management solution. This proposal avoids the use of IP-IP tunnels and it adds the dynamic flow management capability provided by SDN. In order to analyse performance, an analytical model is developed to compare it with NB-DMM (Network-based DMM), one of the main DMM (Distributed Mobility Management) solutions. Additionally, performance is also evaluated with an experimental testbed. The results allow handover latency in real scenarios and numerical investigations to be measured, and also show that SR-DMM achieves better efficiency in terms of signaling and routing cost than NB-DMM solution.

Effective Packet Loss Elimination in IP Mobility Support for Vehicular Networks

With the remarkable advances in wireless communications and mobile electronic technologies, traveling users have been demanding continuous and seamless Internet access to enjoy multimedia services such as video streaming, voice over IP, online gaming, and so on, through handheld smart devices. Providing ubiquitous wireless connectivity to mobile users is indispensable to support continuous online services when vehicles move across various kinds of access networks. However, the high vehicle velocity and complex user mobility in the urban environment impose great challenges on designing an efficient mobility management scheme. In this article, we study the packet loss issue in IP mobility support for vehicular networks. We first give detailed descriptions of some major mobility management solutions. Then, we analyze user mobility models in the urban environment and identify the packet loss issue when traveling users roam across various access networks. By flexibly utilizing tunneling and buffering technologies, we correspondingly design a comprehensive solution to eliminate packet loss in each handover scenario of the urban environment. Finally, performance comparisons between the proposed scheme and related proposals have been conducted, which demonstrate a noteworthy potential of the presented scheme in eliminating packet loss and improving handover performance in urban vehicular communications.

MM-PNEMO: a mathematical model to assess handoff delay and packet loss

Wireless networks incorporate Mobile Nodes (MNs) that use wireless access networks to communicate. However, the communication among these MNs are not remained stable due to the poor network coverage during inter mobility. Moreover, the wireless nodes are typically small that results in resource-constrained. Thus, it is uphill to use algorithms having giant processing power or memory footprint. Accordingly, it is essential to check schemes consistently to evaluate the performance within the probable application scenario. To do so, numerical analysis could be a notable method to grasp the performance of mobility management schemes as well as the constraint of evolving mobility management solutions specifically for multi-interfaced MR in Proxy NEMO environment. This paper analyzes handoff performance by using a mathematical model of Multihoming-based scheme to support Mobility management in Proxy NEMO (MM-PNEMO) environment. Moreover, a comparative study has been made among the standard Network Mobility Basic Support Protocol (NEMO BSP), Proxy NEMO (PNEMO) and MM-PNEMO scheme respectively. The performance metrics estimated for these schemes are mainly handoff delay and packet loss. This paper also analysed the packet loss ratio and handoff gain as a function of cell radius, number of SMR and velocity respectively. It is apparent that, the MM-PNEMO scheme shows lower packet loss ratio (1%) compared to NEMO-BSP (11%) and P-NEMO (6%).

Influence of Personality and Differences in Stress Processing Among Finnish Students on Interest to Use a Mobile Stress Management App: Survey Study.

BackgroundExcessive stress has a negative impact on many aspects of life for both individuals and societies, from studying and working to health and well-being. Each individual has their unique level of stress-proneness, and positive or negative outcomes of stress may be affected by it. Technology-aided interventions have potential efficacy in the self-management of stress. However, current Web-based or mobile stress management solutions may not reach the individuals that would need them the most, that is, stress-sensitive people.ObjectiveThe aim of this study was to examine how personality is associated with stress among Finnish university students and their interest to use apps that help in managing stress.MethodsWe used 2 structured online questionnaires (combined, n=1001) that were advertised in the University of Helsinki’s mailing lists. The first questionnaire (n=635) was used to investigate intercorrelations between the Big Five personality variables (neuroticism, extraversion, openness, agreeableness, and conscientiousness) and other stress-related background variables. The second questionnaire (n=366) was used to study intercorrelations between the above-mentioned study variables and interest in using stress management apps.ResultsThe quantitative findings of the first questionnaire showed that higher levels of extraversion, agreeableness, and conscientiousness were associated with lower self-reported stress. Neuroticism, in turn, was found to be strongly associated with rumination, anxiety, and depression. The findings of the second questionnaire indicated that individuals characterized by the Big Five personality traits of neuroticism and agreeableness were particularly interested to use stress management apps (r=.27, P<.001 and r=.11, P=.032, respectively). Moreover, the binary logistic regression analysis revealed that when a person’s neuroticism is one SD above average (ie, it is higher than among 84% of people), the person has roughly 2 times higher odds of being interested in using a stress management app. Respectively, when a person’s agreeableness is one SD above average, the person has almost 1.4 times higher odds of being interested in using a stress management app.ConclusionsOur results indicated that personality traits may have an influence on the adoption interest of stress management apps. Individuals with high neuroticism are, according to our results, adaptive in the sense that they are interested in using stress management apps that may benefit them. On the contrary, low agreeableness may lead to lower interest to use the mobile stress management apps. The practical implication is that future mobile stress interventions should meaningfully be adjusted to improve user engagement and support health even among less-motivated users, for instance, to successfully engage individuals with low agreeableness.

Anchor-Less Producer Mobility Management in Named Data Networking for Real-Time Multimedia

Information-centric networking (ICN) is one of the promising solutions that cater to the challenges of IP-based networking. ICN shifts the IP-based access model to a data-centric model. Named Data Networking (NDN) is a flexible ICN architecture, which is based on content distribution considering data as the core entity rather than IP-based hosts. User-generated mobile contents for real-time multimedia communication such as Internet telephony are very common these days and are increasing both in quality and quantity. In NDN, producer mobility is one of the challenging problems to support uninterrupted real-time multimedia communication and needs to be resolved for the adoption of NDN as future Internet architecture. We assert that mobile node’s future location prediction can aid in designing efficient anchor-less mobility management techniques. In this article, we show how location prediction techniques can be used to provide an anchor-less mobility management solution in order to ensure seamless handover of the producer during real-time multimedia communication. The results indicate that with a low level of location prediction accuracy, our proposed methodology still profoundly reduces the total handover latency and round trip time without creating network overhead.

Anchor Free IP Mobility

Efficient mobility management techniques are critical in providing seamless connectivity and session continuity between a mobile node and the network during its movement. However, current mobility management solutions generally require a central entity in the network core, tracking IP address movement, and anchoring traffic from source to destination through point-to-point tunnels. Intuitively, this approach suffers from scalability limitations as it creates bottlenecks in the network, due to sub-optimal routing via the anchor point. This is often termed “dog-leg” routing. Meanwhile, alternative anchorless, solutions are not feasible due to the current limitations of the IP semantics, which strongly tie addressing information to location. In contrast, this paper introduces a novel anchorless mobility solution that overcomes these limitations by exploiting a new path-based forwarding fabric together with emerging mechanisms from information-centric networking. These mechanisms decouple the end-system IP address from the path based data forwarding to eliminate the need for anchoring traffic through the network core; thereby, allowing flexible path calculation and service provisioning. Furthermore, by eliminating the limitation of routing via the anchor point, our approach reduces the network cost compared to anchored solutions through bandwidth saving while maintaining comparable handover delay. The proposed solution is applicable to both cellular and large-scale wireless LAN networks that aim to support seamless handover in a single operator domain scenario. The solution is modeled as a Markov-chain which applies a topological basis to describe mobility. The validity of the proposed Markovian model was verified through simulation of both random walk mobility on random geometric networks and trace information from a large-scale, city wide data set. Evaluation results illustrate a significant reduction in the total network traffic cost by 45 percent or more when using the proposed solution, compared to Proxy Mobile IPv6.

Accurate and Efficient Measurements of IP Level Performance to Drive Interface Selection in Heterogeneous Wireless Networks

Optimal interface selection is a key mobility management issue in heterogeneous wireless networks. Measuring the physical or link level performance on a given wireless access networks does not provide a reliable indication of the IP connectivity, delay, and loss on the (bidirectional) paths from the Mobile Host to the node that is handling the mobility, over different heterogeneous networks. In this paper, we propose, implement, and analyze mechanisms for connectivity check and performance (network delay and packet loss) monitoring over IP access networks. We evaluate the accuracy and timeliness of the performance estimates and provide guidelines for tuning up the parameters. From the implementation perspective, we show that using application level measurements is highly CPU intensive, while a kernel based implementation has comparably a very low CPU usage. The Linux kernel implementation results in an efficient use of batteries in Mobile Hosts and intermediate Mobility Management Nodes can scale up to monitoring thousands of flows. The proposed solutions have been implemented in the context of a specific mobility management solution, but the results are of general applicability. The Linux implementation is available as Open Source.

Joint Mobility Management and Multicast Rate Adaptation in Software–Defined Enterprise WLANs

The ever-increasing demand for mobile content delivery and multimedia services is bringing renewed interest in multicast communications in Wi-Fi based WLANs. Nevertheless, multicast over Wi-Fi raises several challenges including low data rates and coexistence issues with other unicast streams. Some amendments to the Wi-Fi standard, such as 802.11aa, have introduced new delivery schemes for multicast traffic as well as finer control on the low-level aspects of the 802.11 medium access scheme. However, the logic for using such features is left to the implementer of the standard. In this paper, we present SDN@Play Mobile , a novel SDN-based solution for joint mobility management and multicast rate-adaptation in Wi-Fi networks. The solution builds upon a new abstraction, named Transmission Policy , which allows the SDN controller to reconfigure a multicast transmission policy when its optimal operating conditions are not met. An experimental evaluation carried out over a real-world testbed shows that our approach can deliver significant improvements in terms of both throughput and channel utilization compared to the legacy 802.11 multicast scheme. Finally, we release the entire software implementation under a permissive APACHE 2.0 license for academic use.