Route optimization for roaming heterogeneous multi-homed mobile networks

With the provisioning of interworked heterogeneous wireless networks and the growing popularity of smart mobile devices, ubiquitous service and data access is showing a demanding growth. As a result, scenarios of group mobility evolved with the increasing trend where a number of commuters on a transportation carriage would access such services. Making this scenario further complex, there was also the likelihood for some commuters to have Personal Area Networks (PANs) onboard as nested networks. Due to the pinball routing problem encountered by nested mobile networks, macro mobility between heterogeneous networks becomes a challenge. Therefore, when a group of users roam as a single unit, interworked heterogeneous networks must be equipped with efficient route optimization and group mobility management support to overcome these issues. Unfortunately, the current standard for supporting a group of members moving between two networks proposed by the Internet Engineering Task Force´s (IETF) NEtwork MObility (NEMO) basic support protocol is limited to homogeneous networks. This paper proposes the integration of NEMO support for enabling group mobility management between multiple heterogeneous networks and route optimization for supporting nested mobility. Results indicate that by integrating NEMO support to an NGMN, handoff, transient packet loss, jitter, and data routing costs are reduced via improved rout optimization.