Enhanced Mobility Management Framework for Future Generation Networks

The Future Generation Networks(FGNs) are proposed to integrate various heterogeneous access technologies, and further expected to support both vertical and seamless handovers. In this motivation, the IEEE 802.21 specifies Media Independent Handover(Mlli) services to enhance the mobile user experience by optimizing handovers between heterogeneous access networks. Additionally, Fast handover for MIPv6(FM1Pv6) is introduced to provide transparent host mobility and to improve handover performance by reducing handover delay as well. This paper focuses on the coordination of FMIPv6 and MIH, and introduces an enhanced mobility management framework suited for FGN. This novel framework replaces handover signaling messages used in wireless networks with novel MIH messages and local primitives. Moreover, Serving Access Router(SAR) performs most of handover processes instead of Mobile Node(MN). Therefore, the proposed mobility management framework reduces handover latency, packet loss, and signaling overhead significantly. We further evaluate the performance of the proposed framework by using both numerical analysis and network simulations.