Heterogeneous Access: Survey and Design Considerations

As voice, multimedia, and data services are converging to IP, there is a need for a new networking architecture to support future innovations and applications. Users are consuming Internet services from multiple devices that have multiple network interfaces such as Wi-Fi, LTE, Bluetooth, and possibly wired LAN. Such diverse network connectivity can be used to increase both reliability and performance by running applications over multiple links, sequentially for seamless user experience, or in parallel for bandwidth and performance enhancements. The existing networking stack, however, offers almost no support for intelligently exploiting such network, device, and location diversity. In this work, we survey recently proposed protocols and architectures that enable heterogeneous networking support. Upon evaluation, we abstract common design patterns and propose a unified networking architecture that makes better use of a heterogeneous dynamic environment, both in terms of networks and devices. The architecture enables mobile nodes to make intelligent decisions about how and when to use each or a combination of networks, based on access policies. With this new architecture, we envision a shift from current applications, which support a single network, location, and device at a time to applications that can support multiple networks, multiple locations, and multiple devices

IP-Based Mobility Management and Handover Latency Measurement in heterogeneous environments

One serious concern in the ubiquitous networks is the seamless vertical handover management between different wireless technologies. To meet this challenge, many standardization organizations proposed different protocols at different layers of the protocol stack. The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) has different groups working on mobility at IP level in order to enhance mobile IPv4 and mobile IPv6 with different variants: HMIPv6 (Hierarchical Mobile IPv6), FMIPv6 (Fast Mobile IPv6) and PMIPv6 (Proxy Mobile IPv6) for seamless handover. Moreover, the IEEE 802.21 standard provides another framework for seamless handover. The 3GPP standard provides the Access Network and Selection Function (ANDSF) to support seamless handover between 3GPP – non 3GPP networks like Wi-Fi, considered as untrusted, and WIMAX considered as trusted networks. In this paper, we present an in-depth analysis of seamless vertical handover protocols and a handover latency comparison of the main mobility management approaches in the literature. The comparison shows the advantages and drawbacks of every mechanism in order to facilitate the adoption of the convenient one for vertical handover within Next Generation Network (NGN) environments. Keywords: Seamless vertical handover, mobility management protocols, IEEE 802.21 MIH, handover latenc

A Survey on Handover Management in Mobility Architectures

This work presents a comprehensive and structured taxonomy of available techniques for managing the handover process in mobility architectures. Representative works from the existing literature have been divided into appropriate categories, based on their ability to support horizontal handovers, vertical handovers and multihoming. We describe approaches designed to work on the current Internet (i.e. IPv4-based networks), as well as those that have been devised for the "future" Internet (e.g. IPv6-based networks and extensions). Quantitative measures and qualitative indicators are also presented and used to evaluate and compare the examined approaches. This critical review provides some valuable guidelines and suggestions for designing and developing mobility architectures, including some practical expedients (e.g. those required in the current Internet environment), aimed to cope with the presence of NAT/firewalls and to provide support to legacy systems and several communication protocols working at the application layer

Future Trends and Challenges for Mobile and Convergent Networks

Some traffic characteristics like real-time, location-based, and community-inspired, as well as the exponential increase on the data traffic in mobile networks, are challenging the academia and standardization communities to manage these networks in completely novel and intelligent ways, otherwise, current network infrastructures can not offer a connection service with an acceptable quality for both emergent traffic demand and application requisites. In this way, a very relevant research problem that needs to be addressed is how a heterogeneous wireless access infrastructure should be controlled to offer a network access with a proper level of quality for diverse flows ending at multi-mode devices in mobile scenarios. The current chapter reviews recent research and standardization work developed under the most used wireless access technologies and mobile access proposals. It comprehensively outlines the impact on the deployment of those technologies in future networking environments, not only on the network performance but also in how the most important requirements of several relevant players, such as, content providers, network operators, and users/terminals can be addressed. Finally, the chapter concludes referring the most notable aspects in how the environment of future networks are expected to evolve like technology convergence, service convergence, terminal convergence, market convergence, environmental awareness, energy-efficiency, self-organized and intelligent infrastructure, as well as the most important functional requisites to be addressed through that infrastructure such as flow mobility, data offloading, load balancing and vertical multihoming.Comment: In book 4G & Beyond: The Convergence of Networks, Devices and Services, Nova Science Publishers, 201

Connection Robustness for Wireless Moving Networks Using Transport Layer Multi-homing

Given any form of mobility management through wireless communication, one useful enhancement is improving the reliability and robustness of transport-layer connections in a heterogeneous mobile environment. This is particularly true in the case of mobile networks with multiple vertical handovers. In this thesis, issues and challenges in mobility management for mobile terminals in such a scenario are addressed, and a number of techniques to facilitate and improve efficiency and the QoS for such a handover are proposed and investigated. These are initially considered in an end-to-end context and all protocols and changes happened in the middleware of the connection where the network is involved with handover issues and end user transparency is satisfied. This thesis begins by investigating mobility management solutions particularly the transport layer models, also making significant observation pertinent to multi-homing for moving networks in general. A new scheme for transport layer tunnelling based on SCTP is proposed. Consequently a novel protocol to handle seamless network mobility in heterogeneous mobile networks, named nSCTP, is proposed. Efficiency of this protocol in relation to QoS for handover parameters in an end-to-end connection while wired and wireless networks are available is considered. Analytically and experimentally it has been proved that this new scheme can significantly increase the throughput, particularly when the mobile networks roam frequently. The detailed plan for the future improvements and expansion is also provided

Wireless IP network mobility management: advancing from mobile IP to HIP-based network

Wireless networking introduces a whole range of challenges to the traditional TCP/IP network. In particular, IP address the issue of overloading because IP addresses are used as a network locator and an end point identity in the different layers in an OSI model. Even though Mobile IP is widely deployed, it has significant problems relating to performance and security. The Host Identity Protocol (HIP) provides secure mobility management by solving the IP address overloading from another angle. It restructures the TCP/IP model and introduces a new layer and a new namespace. The performance of HIP has proven to be better than Mobile IP and also opens a range of new research opportunities. This dissertation proposes and analyses a new step-stone solution from the Mobile IP-based network into a HIP-based network. The main advantage of this new solution is that much less change is required to the operating system kernel of the end point compared to a full HIP implementation. The new step-stone solution allows Mobile IP to use some HIP features to provide better security and handover performance. This dissertation also proposes several new and novel HIP-based wireless communication network architectures. An HIP-based heterogeneous wireless network architecture and handover scheme has been proposed and analysed. These schemes limit the HIP signalling in the wireless network if no communication to external networks is needed. Beside the network architecture modification, the hybrid Session Initial Protocol (SIP) and HIP-based Voice over IP (VoIP) scheme is proposed and analysed. This novel scheme improves the handover latency and security. This dissertation also proposes and analyses a new and novel extension to HIP, a HIP-based micro-mobility management, micro-HIP (mHIP). mHIP provides a new secure framework for micro-mobility management. It is a more complete HIP-based micro-mobility solution than any other proposed in existing studies. mHIP improves the intra-domain handover performance, the security, and the distribution of load in the intra-domain handover signalling. The new work presented opens up a number of very interesting research opportunities

Multicast Mobility in Mobile IP Version 6 (MIPv6) : Problem Statement and Brief Survey

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Handover management in mobile WiMAX using adaptive cross-layer technique

The protocol type and the base station (BS) technology are the main communication media between the Vehicle to Infrastructure (V2I) communication in vehicular networks. During high speed vehicle movement, the best communication would be with a seamless handover (HO) delay in terms of lower packet loss and throughput. Many studies have focused on how to reduce the HO delay during lower speeds of the vehicle with data link (L2) and network (L3) layers protocol. However, this research studied the Transport Layer (L4) protocol mobile Stream Control Transmission Protocol (mSCTP) used as an optimal protocol in collaboration with the Location Manager (LM) and Domain Name Server (DNS). In addition, the BS technology that performs smooth HO employing an adaptive algorithm in L2 to perform the HO according to current vehicle speed was also included in the research. The methods derived from the combination of L4 and the BS technology methods produced an Adaptive Cross-Layer (ACL) design which is a mobility oriented handover management scheme that adapts the HO procedure among the protocol layers. The optimization has a better performance during HO as it is reduces scanning delay and diversity level as well as support transparent mobility among layers in terms of low packet loss and higher throughput. All of these metrics are capable of offering maximum flexibility and efficiency while allowing applications to refine the behaviour of the HO procedure. Besides that, evaluations were performed in various scenarios including different vehicle speeds and background traffic. The performance evaluation of the proposed ACL had approximately 30% improvement making it better than the other handover solutions