Mobility Management for All-IP Mobile Networks

One of the recent trends in networking has been concentrated on realizing all-IP mobile networks, together with new Internet applications and services. For the next generation of all-IP mobile networks, one of the challenging issues is mobility management. The contribution of this chapter is multifold. First, the state of the art in mobility management for all-IP mobile networks is presented, mainly at the network and link layers. Qualitative analysis of positive and negative points among alternative approaches are also discussed and shown. However, the cross-network or link-layer relations to control mobility management in all-IP mobile networks are normally specified at a high-level of abstraction. Thus, the second contribution of this chapter is to consider mobility management for all-IP mobile networks spanning a specific one, the wireless LAN (WLAN) IEEE 802.11 networks, in both network and link layers. Third, different issues in mobility management in all-IP mobile networks spanning into the mobile ad-hoc networks (MANETs) are considered. The reason is that WLANs are 1-hop access networks, while MANETs are multihop access networks. Due to multihop connectivity in MANETs, different problems appear consequent on the mobility of MANET nodes among different domains of all-IP mobile networks. The discovered problems and the proposed solutions to either reduce partly, or remove completely, these discovered problems, and constitute the forth contribution of this chapter. Finally,

Mobility Management for All-IP Mobile Networks 37

this chapter ends with conclusions and lays out some research directions in the next generation of all-IP mobile networks.