Distributed mobility management for efficient video delivery over all-IP mobile networks: Competing approaches

The recent proliferation of multimedia mobile devices and a variety of mobile applications are generating an enormous amount of data traffic over mobile networks. The key driver of the mobile traffic growth is mobile video. Currently, mobile networks are evolving to the 4G system, which has a flatter architecture and provides all-IP-based mobile broadband service. In all-IP mobile networks, IP mobility management is a key function that allows mobile nodes to continue their communications even when their point of attachment to the IP network changes. Existing mobile networks employ a centralized mobility management scheme where all intelligence is concentrated in one end-point system, rather than being distributed through the internet. However, this cannot satisfactorily support mobile videos, which demand a large volume of data and often require QoS such as session continuity and low delay. This motivates distributed mobility management (DMM) solutions that can efficiently handle mobile video traffic. In this article, we survey different approaches for DMM in standards development organizations such as IETF and 3GPP, and also in research organizations. We focus on three different DMM approaches that are currently being considered by the IETF: PMIPv6-based, MIPv6-based, and routing-based DMMs. We provide a qualitative analysis to compare the three DMM approaches and discuss which DMM approaches are more suitable for efficient mobile video delivery.