A Unified Mobility Management Architecture for Interworked Heterogeneous Mobile Networks

The buzzword of this decade has been convergence: the convergence of telecommunications, Internet, entertainment, and information technologies for the seamless provisioning of multimedia services across different network types. Thus the future Next Generation Mobile Network (NGMN) can be envisioned as a group of co-existing heterogeneous mobile data networking technologies sharing a common Internet Protocol (IP) based backbone. In such all-IP based heterogeneous networking environments, ongoing sessions from roaming users are subjected to frequent vertical handoffs across network boundaries. Therefore, ensuring uninterrupted service continuity during session handoffs requires successful mobility and session management mechanisms to be implemented in these participating access networks. Therefore, it is essential for a common interworking framework to be in place for ensuring seamless service continuity over dissimilar networks to enable a potential user to freely roam from one network to another. For the best of our knowledge, the need for a suitable unified mobility and session management framework for the NGMN has not been successfully addressed as yet. This can be seen as the primary motivation of this research. Therefore, the key objectives of this thesis can be stated as: To propose a mobility-aware novel architecture for interworking between heterogeneous mobile data networks To propose a framework for facilitating unified real-time session management (inclusive of session establishment and seamless session handoff) across these different networks. In order to achieve the above goals, an interworking architecture is designed by incorporating the IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) as the coupling mediator between dissipate mobile data networking technologies. Subsequently, two different mobility management frameworks are proposed and implemented over the initial interworking architectural design. The first mobility management framework is fully handled by the IMS at the Application Layer. This framework is primarily dependant on the IMS’s default session management protocol, which is the Session Initiation Protocol (SIP). The second framework is a combined method based on SIP and the Mobile IP (MIP) protocols, which is essentially operated at the Network Layer. An analytical model is derived for evaluating the proposed scheme for analyzing the network Quality of Service (QoS) metrics and measures involved in session mobility management for the proposed mobility management frameworks. More precisely, these analyzed QoS metrics include vertical handoff delay, transient packet loss, jitter, and signaling overhead/cost. The results of the QoS analysis indicates that a MIP-SIP based mobility management framework performs better than its predecessor, the Pure-SIP based mobility management method. Also, the analysis results indicate that the QoS performances for the investigated parameters are within acceptable levels for real-time VoIP conversations. An OPNET based simulation platform is also used for modeling the proposed mobility management frameworks. All simulated scenarios prove to be capable of performing successful VoIP session handoffs between dissimilar networks whilst maintaining acceptable QoS levels. Lastly, based on the findings, the contributions made by this thesis can be summarized as: The development of a novel framework for interworked heterogeneous mobile data networks in a NGMN environment. The final design conveniently enables 3G cellular technologies (such as the Universal Mobile Telecommunications Systems (UMTS) or Code Division Multiple Access 2000 (CDMA2000) type systems), Wireless Local Area Networking (WLAN) technologies, and Wireless Metropolitan Area Networking (WMAN) technologies (e.g., Broadband Wireless Access (BWA) systems such as WiMAX) to interwork under a common signaling platform. The introduction of a novel unified/centralized mobility and session management platform by exploiting the IMS as a universal coupling mediator for real-time session negotiation and management. This enables a roaming user to seamlessly handoff sessions between different heterogeneous networks. As secondary outcomes of this thesis, an analytical framework and an OPNET simulation framework are developed for analyzing vertical handoff performance. This OPNET simulation platform is suitable for commercial use

Architectural and mobility management designs in internet-based infrastructure wireless mesh networks

Wireless mesh networks (WMNs) have recently emerged to be a cost-effective solution to support large-scale wireless Internet access. They have numerous ap- plications, such as broadband Internet access, building automation, and intelligent transportation systems. One research challenge for Internet-based WMNs is to design efficient mobility management techniques for mobile users to achieve seamless roam- ing. Mobility management includes handoff management and location management. The objective of this research is to design new handoff and location management techniques for Internet-based infrastructure WMNs. Handoff management enables a wireless network to maintain active connections as mobile users move into new service areas. Previous solutions on handoff manage- ment in infrastructure WMNs mainly focus on intra-gateway mobility. New handoff issues involved in inter-gateway mobility in WMNs have not been properly addressed. Hence, a new architectural design is proposed to facilitate inter-gateway handoff man- agement in infrastructure WMNs. The proposed architecture is designed to specifi- cally address the special handoff design challenges in Internet-based WMNs. It can facilitate parallel executions of handoffs from multiple layers, in conjunction with a data caching mechanism which guarantees minimum packet loss during handoffs. Based on the proposed architecture, a Quality of Service (QoS) handoff mechanism is also proposed to achieve QoS requirements for both handoff and existing traffic before and after handoffs in the inter-gateway WMN environment. Location management in wireless networks serves the purpose of tracking mobile users and locating them prior to establishing new communications. Existing location management solutions proposed for single-hop wireless networks cannot be directly applied to Internet-based WMNs. Hence, a dynamic location management framework in Internet-based WMNs is proposed that can guarantee the location management performance and also minimize the protocol overhead. In addition, a novel resilient location area design in Internet-based WMNs is also proposed. The formation of the location areas can adapt to the changes of both paging load and service load so that the tradeoff between paging overhead and mobile device power consumption can be balanced, and at the same time, the required QoS performance of existing traffic is maintained. Therefore, together with the proposed handoff management design, efficient mobility management can be realized in Internet-based infrastructure WMNs

Mobile Networking

We point out the different performance problems that need to be addressed when considering mobility in IP networks. We also define the reference architecture and present a framework to classify the different solutions for mobility management in IP networks. The performance of the major candidate micro-mobility solutions is evaluated for both real-time (UDP) and data (TCP) traffic through simulation and by means of an analytical model. Using these models we compare the performance of different mobility management schemes for different data and real-time services and the network resources that are needed for it. We point out the problems of TCP in wireless environments and review some proposed enhancements to TCP that aim at improving TCP performance. We make a detailed study of how some of micro-mobility protocols namely Cellular IP, Hawaii and Hierarchical Mobile IP affect the behavior of TCP and their interaction with the MAC layer. We investigate the impact of handoffs on TCP by means of simulation traces that show the evolution of segments and acknowledgments during handoffs.Publicad

Traffic modeling in mobile internet protocol : version 6.

Thesis (M.Sc.Eng.)-University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban, 2005.Mobile Internet Protocol Version 6 (lPv6) is the new version of the Internet Protocol (IP) born out of the great success of Internet Protocol version 4 (IPv4). The motivation behind the development of Mobile IPv6 standard stems from user's demand for mobile devices which can connect and move seamlessly across a growing number of connectivity options. It is both suitable for mobility between subnets across homogenous and inhomogeneous media. The protocol allows a mobile node to communicate with other hosts after changing its point of attachment from one subnet to another. The huge address space available meets the requirements for rapid development of internet as the number of mobile nodes increases tremendously with the rapid expansion of the internet. Mobility, security and quality of service (QoS) being integrated in Mobile TPv6 makes it the important foundation stone for building the mobile information society and the future internet. Convergence between current network technologies: the intern et and mobile telephony is taking place, but the internet's IP routing was designed to work with conventional static nodes. Mobile IPv6 is therefore considered to be one of the key technologies for realizing convergence which enables seamless communication between fixed and mobile access networks. For this reason, there is numerous works in location registrations and mobility management, traffic modeling, QoS, routing procedures etc. To meet the increased demand for mobile telecommunications, traffic modeling is an important step towards understanding and solving performance problems in the future wireless IP networks. Understanding the nature of this traffic, identifying its characteristics and developing appropriate traffic models coupled with appropriate mobility management architectures are of great importance to the traffic engineering and performance evaluation of these networks. It is imperative that the mobility management used keeps providing good performance to mobile users and maintain network load due to signaling and packet delivery as low as possible. To reduce this load, Intemet Engineering Task Force (IETF) proposed a regional mobility management. The load is reduced by allowing local migrations to be handled locally transparent from the Home Agent and the Correspondent Node as the mobile nodes roams freely around the network. This dissertation tackles two major aspects. Firstly, we propose the dynamic regional mobility management (DRMM) architecture with the aim to minimize network load while keeping an optimal number of access routers in the region. The mobility management is dynamic based on the movement and population of the mobile nodes around the network. Most traffic models in telecommunication networks have been based on the exponential Poisson processes. This model unfortunately has been proved to be unsuitable for modeling busty IP traffic. Several approaches to model IP traffic using Markovian processes have been developed using the Batch Markovian Alrival Process (BMAP) by characterizing arrivals as batches of sizes of different distributions. The BMAP is constructed by generalizing batch Poisson processes to allow for non-exponential times between arrivals of batches while maintaining an underlying Markovian structure. The second aspect of this dissertation covers the traffic characterization. We give the analysis of an access router as a single server queue with unlimited waiting space under a non pre-emptive priority queuing discipline. We model the arrival process as a superposition of BMAP processes. We characterize the superimposed arrival processes using the BMAP presentation. We derive the queue length and waiting time for this type of queuing system. Performance of this traffic model is evaluated by obtaining numerical results in terms of queue length and waiting time and its distribution for the high and low priority traffic. We finally present a call admission control scheme that supports QoS

Survivability, Scalability and Security of Mobility Protocols

Today mobile computing has become a necessity and we are witnessing explosive growth in the number of mobile devices accessing the Internet. To facilitate continuous Internet connectivity for nodes and networks in motion, mobility protocols are required and they exchange various signaling messages with the mobility infrastructure for protocol operation. Proliferation in mobile computing has raised several research issues for the mobility protocols. First, it is essential to perform cost and scalability analysis of mobility protocols to find out their resource requirement to cope with future expansion. Secondly, mobility protocols have survivability issues and are vulnerable to security threats, since wireless communication media can be easily accessible to intruders. The third challenge in mobile computing is the protection ofsignaling messages against losses due to high bandwidth requirementof multimedia in mobile environments. However, there is lack of existing works that focus on the quantitative analysis of cost, scalability, survivability and security of mobility protocols.In this dissertation, we have performed comprehensive evaluation ofmobility protocols. We have presented tools and methodologies required for the cost, scalability, survivability and security analysis of mobilityprotocols. We have proposed a dynamic scheduling algorithm to protect mobility signaling message against losses due to increased multimedia traffic in mobile environments and have also proposed a mobile networkarchitecture that aims at maximizing bandwidth utilization. The analysis presented in this work can help network engineers compare different mobility protocols quantitatively, thereby choose one that is reliable, secure, survivable and scalable

Mobile Networks

The growth in the use of mobile networks has come mainly with the third generation systems and voice traffic. With the current third generation and the arrival of the 4G, the number of mobile users in the world will exceed the number of landlines users. Audio and video streaming have had a significant increase, parallel to the requirements of bandwidth and quality of service demanded by those applications. Mobile networks require that the applications and protocols that have worked successfully in fixed networks can be used with the same level of quality in mobile scenarios. Until the third generation of mobile networks, the need to ensure reliable handovers was still an important issue. On the eve of a new generation of access networks (4G) and increased connectivity between networks of different characteristics commonly called hybrid (satellite, ad-hoc, sensors, wired, WIMAX, LAN, etc.), it is necessary to transfer mechanisms of mobility to future generations of networks. In order to achieve this, it is essential to carry out a comprehensive evaluation of the performance of current protocols and the diverse topologies to suit the new mobility conditions

Rapidly IPv6 multimedia management schemes based LTE-A wireless networks

Ensuring the best quality of smart multimedia services becomes an essential goal for modern enterprises so there is always a need for effective IP mobility smart management schemes in order to fulfill the following two main functions: (I) interconnecting the moving terminals around the extended indoor smart services. In addition, (II) providing session continuity for instant data transfer in real-time and multimedia applications with negligible latency, efficient bandwidth utilization, and improved reliability. In this context, it found out that the Generalized Multi-Protocol Label Switching (GMPLS) over LTE-A network that offers many advanced services for large numbers of users with higher bandwidths, better spectrum efficiency, and lower latency. In GMPLS, there is an elimination of the routing searches and choice of routing protocols on every core LTE-A router also it provides the architecture simplicity and increases the scalability. A comparative assessment of three types of IPv6 mobility management schemes over the LTE-A provided by using various types of multimedia. By using OPNET Simulator 17.5, In accordance with these schemes, it was proven that the IPv6-GMPLS scheme is the best choice for the system's operation, in comparison to the IPv6-MPLS and Mobile IPv6 for all multimedia offerings and on the overall network performance

SIGMA: A mobility architecture for terrestrial and space networks.

Internet Protocol (IP) mobility can be handled at different layers of the protocol stack. Mobile IP has been developed to handle mobility of Internet hosts at the network layer. Mobile IP suffers from a number of drawbacks such as the requirement for infrastructure change, high handover latency, high packet loss rate, and conflict with network security solutions. As an alternative solution, a few transport layer mobility protocols have been proposed in the context of Transmission Control Protocol (TCP), for example, MSOCKS and TCP connection migration. In this dissertation, a S&barbelow; eamless I&barbelow; P-diversity-based G&barbelow; eneralized M&barbelow; obility Architecture (SIGMA) is described. SIGMA works at the transport layer and utilizes IP diversity to achieve seamless handover, and is designed to solve many of the drawbacks of Mobile IP. It can also cooperate with normal IPv4 or IPv6 infrastructure without the support of Mobile IP. The handover performance, signaling cost, and survivability issues of SIGMA are evaluated and compared with those of Mobile IP. A hierarchical location management scheme for SIGMA is developed to reduce the signaling cost of SIGMA, which is also useful to other transport layer mobility solutions. SIGMA is shown to be also applicable to managing satellite handovers in space. Finally, the interoperability between SIGMA and existing Internet security mechanisms is discussed

Exploiting user contention to optimize proactive resource allocation in future networks

In order to provide ubiquitous communication, seamless connectivity is now required in all environments including highly mobile networks. By using vertical handover techniques it is possible to provide uninterrupted communication as connections are dynamically switched between wireless networks as users move around. However, in a highly mobile environment, traditional reactive approaches to handover are inadequate. Therefore, proactive handover techniques, in which mobile nodes attempt to determine the best time and place to handover to local networks, are actively being investigated in the context of next generation mobile networks. The Y-Comm Framework which looks at proactive handover techniques has de�fined two key parameters: Time Before Handover and the Network Dwell Time, for any given network topology. Using this approach, it is possible to enhance resource management in common networks using probabilistic mechanisms because it is now possible to express contention for resources in terms of: No Contention, Partial Contention and Full Contention. As network resources are shared between many users, resource management must be a key part of any communication system as it is needed to provide seamless communication and to ensure that applications and servers receive their required Quality-of-Service. In this thesis, the contention for channel resources being allocated to mobile nodes is analysed. The work presents a new methodology to support proactive resource allocation for emerging future networks such as Vehicular Ad-Hoc Networks (VANETs) by allowing us to calculate the probability of contention based on user demand of network resources. These results are veri�ed using simulation. In addition, this proactive approach is further enhanced by the use of a contention queue to detect contention between incoming requests and those waiting for service. This thesis also presents a new methodology to support proactive resource allocation for future networks such as Vehicular Ad-Hoc Networks. The proposed approach has been applied to a vehicular testbed and results are presented that show that this approach can improve overall network performance in mobile heterogeneous environments. The results show that the analysis of user contention does provide a proactive mechanism to improve the performance of resource allocation in mobile networks

A Framework of Cooperating Agents Hierarchies for Local-Area Mobility Support

Host mobility creates a routing problem in the Internet, where an IP address reflects the network\u27s point of attachment. Mobile IP, relying on a mapping between a home address and a care-of address, and a home registration process, is widely accepted as a solution for the host mobility problem in wide-area mobility scenarios. However, its home registration requirement, upon each change of point of attachment, makes it unsuitable to handle local-area mobility, resulting in large handoff latencies, increased packet loss, and disrupted services. In this dissertation, we introduce a local-area mobility support framework for IPv4 based on the deployment of multiple cooperating mobility agents hierarchies in the foreign domain. First, we introduce a hierarchy model offering a backward compatible mode to service legacy mobile hosts, unaware of local-area mobility extensions. Second, for intra-hierarchy handoffs, we identify several design deficiencies within the current Mobile IP hierarchy extension proposal, and present an enhanced regional registration framework for local handoffs that encompasses a replay protection identification value dissemination mechanism. In addition, we present two novel registration frameworks for home registrations involving local handoffs, in which we identify the dual nature of such registrations, and attempt to emphasize the local handoff aspect. One technique, maintains tunneling of data packets to the MH (Mobile Host) through an old path until a home registration reply is received to set up the new path. In contrast, the other technique adopts a more proactive bold approach in switching immediately to the new path resulting in a reduction of the handoff latency. Third, for inter-hierarchy handoffs, we present a scalable, configurable, and cooperation based framework between mobility agents hierarchies to reduce the handoffs latencies. An attempt is made to exploit the expected network proximity between hierarchies within the foreign domain, and maintain a mobile host\u27s home-registered care-of address unchanged while within the same foreign domain. In addition, the involved registration signaling design requires a reduced number of security associations between mobility agents belonging to different hierarchies, and copes with the fact that the mobile host\u27s home-registered care-of address might not be reachable