HDMM: deploying client and network-based distributed mobility management

Mobile operators are now facing the challenges posed by a huge data demand from users, mainly due to the introduction of modern portable devices and the success of mobile applications. Moreover, users are now capable to connect from different access networks and establish several active sessions simultaneously, while being mobile. This triggered the introduction of a new paradigm: the distributed mobility management (DMM) which aims at flattening the network and distributing the entities in charge of managing users' mobility. In this article, we review existing DMM proposals and describe a hybrid solution which benefits from combining a network-based and a client-based approach. We analyze the signaling cost and the handover latency of our proposal, comparing them with their centralized alternatives. We also include validation and performance results from experiments conducted with a Linux-based prototype, which show that achievable enhancements depend on the underlying network topology. We argue that the proposed hybrid DMM solution provides additional flexibility to the mobile network operators, which can decide when and how to combine these two approaches.The research leading to these results has received funding from the European Community’s Seventh Framework Programme (FP7-ICT-2009-5) under Grant agreement n. 258053 (MEDIEVAL project) and from the Spanish Government, MICINN, under research grant TIN2010-20136-C0

Distributed IP mobility management for hosts and networks

Includes bibliographical references.The Internet was originally designed for stationary nodes. With the advancement of mobile nodes (such as smartphones and tablets) that have wireless Internet access capability, the original design of the Internet is no longer sufficient. These mobile nodes are capable of communicating while moving and changing their point of attachment in the Internet. To maintain communication session(s) continuity for these mobile nodes, the Internet needs mobility management mechanisms. The main mobility management protocols standardised by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) are mobile IP (MIPv6 and MIPv4) and their numerous extensions and variants, including proxy MIP (PMIPv6 and PMIPv4). The architectural structures of these protocols employ a centralized mobility anchor to manage the mobility of the mobile nodes in the control and data planes. The mobility anchor manages the mobility binding information and the forwarding of data packets for all mobile nodes registered in the network. However, in the context of the rapid growth in the number of mobile users and the data traffic volume, as well as the trend towards a flat architecture in mobile networks, the centralized mobility management approach provides insufficient mobility support to the mobile nodes. For example, to manage the demand for increased mobile users, a huge amount of data traffic will be pushed to the centralized mobility anchor. Yet, routing huge volumes of traffic via the centralized mobility anchor can be non-optimal in terms of routing efficiency. Thus, the centralised mobility anchor can be a potential bottleneck, and a single point of failure. Consequently, failure of the mobility anchor may lead to a service outage for a large number of mobile nodes. Ultimately, the centralized mobility management approach does not scale well with the increase in number of mobile users and the data traffic volume. These problems are also costly to resolve within the centralized mobility management approach and its related centralized network architecture. Distributed mobility management (DMM) is one recent approach that can efficiently address the shortcomings of centralized mobility management. It provides an alternative paradigm for developing IP mobility management – without employing centralized mobility anchors. In this paradigm, either the mobility anchors, or their mobility management functions, are distributed to different networks/elements. The mobility anchors, or the mobility management functions, are brought to the edge of the networks, which is closer to the mobile nodes. Distributed mobility management also offers dynamic mobility features that allow a mobile node to anchor traffic at different mobility anchors. However, to date, mobility management schemes that have been developed based on the DMM approach are still in the preliminary stages, and there is no current standard in place. These developed DMM schemes are still experiencing problems, such as long routing paths, especially for long-lasting data traffic, a lack of route optimization for ongoing communication, and a lack of synchronization of the mobile nodes‟ location in different networks. Moreover, the majority of these proposed schemes still need to be analysed, in order to quantify their feasibility. The thesis proposes three novel network-based distributed mobility management schemes, which are based on the DMM approach. The schemes enhance PMIPv6 to work in a distributed manner, in order to address the problems of centralized mobility management. Furthermore, the schemes address the following issues: (1) the lack of route optimization for ongoing communication; (2) the lack of synchronization of the mobile nodes‟ location in different networks; and (3) the long end-to-end packet delivery delay problems in recently proposed DMM schemes. The first scheme, called the network-based distributed mobility management scheme with routing management function at the gateways (DM-RMG), decomposes the logical mobility management functions of the Local Mobility Anchor (LMA) in PMIPv6 into internetwork location management (LM), routing management (RM), and home network prefix allocation (HNP) functions. After the decomposition, the RM function is collocated at the gateways of different networks. In this way, the data-plane routing function of the respective mobile nodes is served by the corresponding local RM function at the network gateway. The DM-RMG scheme offers distributed mobility management for individual mobile nodes (i.e., mobile hosts) during mobility events. DM-RMG also implements a mechanism to optimize the handover delay. The results obtained from analytical modelling and simulation show that the DM-RMG scheme outperforms the centralized mobility management schemes, as well as currently proposed distributed mobility management schemes in terms of the end-to-end packet delivery delay under different network load conditions. The optimized handover performance of the DM-RMG scheme, investigated under different traffic patterns and mobile node speeds, shows that the scheme also mitigates the internetwork handover delay and packet loss. The second proposed scheme, called network-based distributed mobility management for the network mobility (NDM-RMG), uses a similar approach to DM-RMG. However, it proposes a network-based DMM scheme for Network Mobility (NEMO). The main goal of the NDMRMG scheme is to address the problems of centralized mobility management protocols for NEMO, including the pinball routing problem in nested NEMO. NDM-RMG is compared with centralized mobility management schemes for NEMO, and recently proposed distributed IP mobility management schemes for NEMO by means of analytical modelling and simulation evaluations. NDM-RMG shows better performance in terms of reducing the packet delivery latency, the size of the packet header, and the packet overhead experienced over the wireless link. The third proposed scheme, called network-based distributed mobility management scheme with RM and HNP allocation functions distributed to the access routers (DM-RMA), distributes the RM and the HNP allocation functions at the access routers with the mobility client function. This brings the mobility-related functions closer to the mobile nodes, that is, to the edge of the network. An analytical model is developed to investigate the mobility cost performance of the scheme, due to signalling, packet delivery, and tunnelling. The analytical results indicate that DM-RMA performs better than the previous DMM schemes in terms of packet delivery, tunnelling and total costs. Network simulator-2 (ns-2) is used to model the DM-RMA scheme. The simulated scenarios confirm that DM-RMA performs better than other proposed DMM schemes in terms of reducing the location update latency at the location managers, end-to-end packet delivery delay, handover delay, and packet loss. In addition to the three proposed DMM schemes, this thesis proposes a routing optimization scheme for PMIPv6. The main goal of this scheme is to enable PMIPv6 to offer route optimization to mobile nodes in a PMIPv6 domain. The scheme reduces the route optimization-establishment latency, the packet delivery latency, and the packet loss. Using ns-2 simulations and considering different simulated scenarios, the results show that the scheme reduces route optimization-establishment latency and delayed packets during the route optimization operation, as compared to previously proposed PMIPv6 route optimization schemes. The results also show that the scheme reduces packet loss when a mobile node undergoes handover in the PMIPv6 domain

Game theory for dynamic spectrum sharing cognitive radio

This thesis was submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy and was awarded by Brunel University on 21 June 2010.‘Game Theory’ is the formal study of conflict and cooperation. The theory is based on a set of tools that have been developed in order to assist with the modelling and analysis of individual, independent decision makers. These actions potentially affect any decisions, which are made by other competitors. Therefore, it is well suited and capable of addressing the various issues linked to wireless communications. This work presents a Green Game-Based Hybrid Vertical Handover Model. The model is used for heterogeneous wireless networks, which combines both dynamic (Received Signal Strength and Node Mobility) and static (Cost, Power Consumption and Bandwidth) factors. These factors control the handover decision process; whereby the mechanism successfully eliminates any unnecessary handovers, reduces delay and overall number of handovers to 50% less and 70% less dropped packets and saves 50% more energy in comparison to other mechanisms. A novel Game-Based Multi-Interface Fast-Handover MIPv6 protocol is introduced in this thesis as an extension to the Multi-Interface Fast-handover MIPv6 protocol. The protocol works when the mobile node has more than one wireless interface. The protocol controls the handover decision process by deciding whether a handover is necessary and helps the node to choose the right access point at the right time. In addition, the protocol switches the mobile nodes interfaces ‘ON’ and ‘OFF’ when needed to control the mobile node’s energy consumption and eliminate power lost of adding another interface. The protocol successfully reduces the number of handovers to 70%, 90% less dropped packets, 40% more received packets and acknowledgments and 85% less end-to-end delay in comparison to other Protocols. Furthermore, the thesis adapts a novel combination of both game and auction theory in dynamic resource allocation and price-power-based routing in wireless Ad-Hoc networks. Under auction schemes, destinations nodes bid the information data to access to the data stored in the server node. The server will allocate the data to the winner who values it most. Once the data has been allocated to the winner, another mechanism for dynamic routing is adopted. The routing mechanism is based on the source-destination cooperation, power consumption and source-compensation to the intermediate nodes. The mechanism dramatically increases the seller’s revenue to 50% more when compared to random allocation scheme and briefly evaluates the reliability of predefined route with respect to data prices, source and destination cooperation for different network settings. Last but not least, this thesis adjusts an adaptive competitive second-price pay-to-bid sealed auction game and a reputation-based game. This solves the fairness problems associated with spectrum sharing amongst one primary user and a large number of secondary users in a cognitive radio environment. The proposed games create a competition between the bidders and offers better revenue to the players in terms of fairness to more than 60% in certain scenarios. The proposed game could reach the maximum total profit for both primary and secondary users with better fairness; this is illustrated through numerical results

LTE Indoor MIMO Performance and Antenna Configuration

Long-term evolution (LTE) and multiple input multiple output (MIMO) have earned reputations to be a cutting‒edge technology, which can boost significantly wireless communication performances. However, many aspects influence on LTE MIMO efficiency; those include propagation environments and antenna configurations. The goal of the thesis is to study performances of LTE MIMO on downlink in indoor. MIMO gains over transmit diversity and single antenna are the objective. Additionally, the study compares MIMO indoor performances with different antenna configurations at LTE base station and UE, including space diversity and polarization diversity. Some results obtained in this thesis follow the expectations what have been studied in literature and previous practical studies but some differences are also pointed out. Medium access control throughput (MAC TP) and some system parameters in LTE network that are linked with TP are analysed; those parameters are CQI, MCS as well as MIMO utilization. Effects of indoor propagation, such as LoS, NLoS, good and bad signal levels on SNR strength and MIMO utilization are clarified. In overall, MIMO outperforms transmit diversity (TxDiv) and single antenna in LTE indoor. The overall MIMO MAC TP gains are about nearly 40.0% over TxDiv and more than 20.0% over single stream. LoS environment boost SNR strength. Hence, up to 35.0% TP gain over single antenna is achieved. However, LoS signals make the channel become correlated due to lack of multipaths, causing that MIMO is not fully utilized. The gain of MIMO over single antenna is reduced at no LoS environments, particularly only around 17.0% and 21.0% MAC TP gains are recorded at NLoS channels with good signal levels and weak signal strength, relatively. The overall TP gain the UE experiences by using TxDiv over single antenna is roughly more than 20.0%, but LoS environment limits TxDiv performance. Hence, at LoS channel, TxDiv performance is reduced by around 2.0% compared to single stream. The worse the channel, the better TxDiv performs. The highest gain is at cell edge environment when TxDiv improves throughput more than 40.0% over single antenna. Clearly, antenna configuration impacts network performance. Large horizontal separation (7λ) between antenna elements outperforms small separation (0.5λ) in terms of SNR, MIMO utilization and MAC TP. The MAC TPs of large separation by using omni-directional and directional antennas are almost similar, around 27.0 Mbps. Space diversity with omni-directional antennas provides roughly 14.0% MAC TP improvement while only approximately 4.5% TP gain can be achieved with directional antennas. Vertical‒horizontal polarization pair deployed at LTE base station is found to provide better performance over vertical‒vertical polarization and X‒pol pairs. Signals also appear to be more correlated with vertical-horizontal polarization pair since MIMO utilization gets better values, MIMO utilization gains are around 18.0% over vertical-vertical polarization pair and 6.0% over X-pol pair, resulting in around 31.7% and 17.0% MAC TP gains over the two latter, relatively. The results also point out that changing polarizations at UE do not give clear MAC TP and MIMO utilization improvements. From the radio network planning point of view, the results obtained in this thesis can be considered as guidelines for indoor network planning and optimization for network operators. It is important to conclude that based on the measurements made in this thesis, space diversity (7λ) with omni-directional antennas and vertical-horizontal polarization pairs appear to give optimal indoor performance. However, it should be taken into consideration that all results presented in this thesis are highly dependable on the chosen antennas, LTE network systems, devices and indoor environment where the measurements are carried out. Hence, the results may vary with the factors mentioned

Game theory for dynamic spectrum sharing cognitive radio

‘Game Theory’ is the formal study of conflict and cooperation. The theory is based on a set of tools that have been developed in order to assist with the modelling and analysis of individual, independent decision makers. These actions potentially affect any decisions, which are made by other competitors. Therefore, it is well suited and capable of addressing the various issues linked to wireless communications. This work presents a Green Game-Based Hybrid Vertical Handover Model. The model is used for heterogeneous wireless networks, which combines both dynamic (Received Signal Strength and Node Mobility) and static (Cost, Power Consumption and Bandwidth) factors. These factors control the handover decision process; whereby the mechanism successfully eliminates any unnecessary handovers, reduces delay and overall number of handovers to 50% less and 70% less dropped packets and saves 50% more energy in comparison to other mechanisms. A novel Game-Based Multi-Interface Fast-Handover MIPv6 protocol is introduced in this thesis as an extension to the Multi-Interface Fast-handover MIPv6 protocol. The protocol works when the mobile node has more than one wireless interface. The protocol controls the handover decision process by deciding whether a handover is necessary and helps the node to choose the right access point at the right time. In addition, the protocol switches the mobile nodes interfaces ‘ON’ and ‘OFF’ when needed to control the mobile node’s energy consumption and eliminate power lost of adding another interface. The protocol successfully reduces the number of handovers to 70%, 90% less dropped packets, 40% more received packets and acknowledgments and 85% less end-to-end delay in comparison to other Protocols. Furthermore, the thesis adapts a novel combination of both game and auction theory in dynamic resource allocation and price-power-based routing in wireless Ad-Hoc networks. Under auction schemes, destinations nodes bid the information data to access to the data stored in the server node. The server will allocate the data to the winner who values it most. Once the data has been allocated to the winner, another mechanism for dynamic routing is adopted. The routing mechanism is based on the source-destination cooperation, power consumption and source-compensation to the intermediate nodes. The mechanism dramatically increases the seller’s revenue to 50% more when compared to random allocation scheme and briefly evaluates the reliability of predefined route with respect to data prices, source and destination cooperation for different network settings. Last but not least, this thesis adjusts an adaptive competitive second-price pay-to-bid sealed auction game and a reputation-based game. This solves the fairness problems associated with spectrum sharing amongst one primary user and a large number of secondary users in a cognitive radio environment. The proposed games create a competition between the bidders and offers better revenue to the players in terms of fairness to more than 60% in certain scenarios. The proposed game could reach the maximum total profit for both primary and secondary users with better fairness; this is illustrated through numerical results.EThOS - Electronic Theses Online ServiceGBUnited Kingdo

MOBILITY SUPPORT ARCHITECTURES FOR NEXT-GENERATION WIRELESS NETWORKS

With the convergence of the wireless networks and the Internet and the booming demand for multimedia applications, the next-generation (beyond the third generation, or B3G) wireless systems are expected to be all IP-based and provide real-time and non-real-time mobile services anywhere and anytime. Powerful and efficient mobility support is thus the key enabler to fulfil such an attractive vision by supporting various mobility scenarios. This thesis contributes to this interesting while challenging topic. After a literature review on mobility support architectures and protocols, the thesis starts presenting our contributions with a generic multi-layer mobility support framework, which provides a general approach to meet the challenges of handling comprehensive mobility issues. The cross-layer design methodology is introduced to coordinate the protocol layers for optimised system design. Particularly, a flexible and efficient cross-layer signalling scheme is proposed for interlayer interactions. The proposed generic framework is then narrowed down with several fundamental building blocks identified to be focused on as follows. As widely adopted, we assume that the IP-based access networks are organised into administrative domains, which are inter-connected through a global IP-based wired core network. For a mobile user who roams from one domain to another, macro (inter-domain) mobility management should be in place for global location tracking and effective handoff support for both real-time and non-real-lime applications. Mobile IP (MIP) and the Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) are being adopted as the two dominant standard-based macro-mobility architectures, each of which has mobility entities and messages in its own right. The work explores the joint optimisations and interactions of MIP and SIP when utilising the complementary power of both protocols. Two distinctive integrated MIP-SIP architectures are designed and evaluated, compared with their hybrid alternatives and other approaches. The overall analytical and simulation results shown significant performance improvements in terms of cost-efficiency, among other metrics. Subsequently, for the micro (intra-domain) mobility scenario where a mobile user moves across IP subnets within a domain, a micro mobility management architecture is needed to support fast handoffs and constrain signalling messaging loads incurred by intra-domain movements within the domain. The Hierarchical MIPv6 (HMIPv6) and the Fast Handovers for MIPv6 (FMIPv6) protocols are selected to fulfil the design requirements. The work proposes enhancements to these protocols and combines them in an optimised way. resulting in notably improved performances in contrast to a number of alternative approaches

Evolution of Non-Terrestrial Networks From 5G to 6G: A Survey

Non-terrestrial networks (NTNs) traditionally have certain limited applications. However, the recent technological advancements and manufacturing cost reduction opened up myriad applications of NTNs for 5G and beyond networks, especially when integrated into terrestrial networks (TNs). This article comprehensively surveys the evolution of NTNs highlighting their relevance to 5G networks and essentially, how it will play a pivotal role in the development of 6G ecosystem. We discuss important features of NTNs integration into TNs and the synergies by delving into the new range of services and use cases, various architectures, technological enablers, and higher layer aspects pertinent to NTNs integration. Moreover, we review the corresponding challenges arising from the technical peculiarities and the new approaches being adopted to develop efficient integrated ground-air-space (GAS) networks. Our survey further includes the major progress and outcomes from academic research as well as industrial efforts representing the main industrial trends, field trials, and prototyping towards the 6G networks

Evolution of Non-Terrestrial Networks From 5G to 6G: A Survey

Non-terrestrial networks (NTNs) traditionally have certain limited applications. However, the recent technological advancements and manufacturing cost reduction opened up myriad applications of NTNs for 5G and beyond networks, especially when integrated into terrestrial networks (TNs). This article comprehensively surveys the evolution of NTNs highlighting their relevance to 5G networks and essentially, how it will play a pivotal role in the development of 6G ecosystem. We discuss important features of NTNs integration into TNs and the synergies by delving into the new range of services and use cases, various architectures, technological enablers, and higher layer aspects pertinent to NTNs integration. Moreover, we review the corresponding challenges arising from the technical peculiarities and the new approaches being adopted to develop efficient integrated ground-air-space (GAS) networks. Our survey further includes the major progress and outcomes from academic research as well as industrial efforts representing the main industrial trends, field trials, and prototyping towards the 6G networks

Connecting vehicular networks to the internet : a life time-based routing protocol

Inter-Vehicle Communications have recently attracted the attention of researchers in academia and industry. In such networks, vehicles should be able to communicate among each other (V2V) as well as with roadside Infrastructure units (V2I). Vehicular networks try to provide safety on the roads by disseminating critical messages among vehicles. Infrastructure units provide some services such as driver information systems and Internet access. Because of the high speed and high mobility of vehicles, establishing and maintaining a connection to these units is very challenging. We introduce a new protocol that uses the characteristics of vehicle movements to predict the vehicle behavior and select a route with the longest life-time to connect to the wired network. It aims at spreading the advertisement messages through multi-hops without flooding the network, do seamless hand-overs and select the most stable routes to these units. We performed some simulations and compared the performance of our work with some well-known protocols

Recent Advances in Wireless Communications and Networks

This book focuses on the current hottest issues from the lowest layers to the upper layers of wireless communication networks and provides "real-time" research progress on these issues. The authors have made every effort to systematically organize the information on these topics to make it easily accessible to readers of any level. This book also maintains the balance between current research results and their theoretical support. In this book, a variety of novel techniques in wireless communications and networks are investigated. The authors attempt to present these topics in detail. Insightful and reader-friendly descriptions are presented to nourish readers of any level, from practicing and knowledgeable communication engineers to beginning or professional researchers. All interested readers can easily find noteworthy materials in much greater detail than in previous publications and in the references cited in these chapters