Bandwidth Efficient Mobility Management for Heterogeneous Wireless Networks

An important feature of the upcoming fourth generation wireless networks is support for heterogeneous radio access technologies in combination with an all-IP type of overall architecture. Operators and users will benefit from a smooth technology transition leveraging existing investments and use a variety of access technologies simultaneously. This paper describes and evaluates an innovative mobility management scheme in such an environment. It does not require any changes to the IP stack in the mobile node and does not introduce any additional overhead to the payload traffic over air interfaces. Furthermore, it does not add any signaling overhead and outperforms existing mobility management schemes for heterogeneous environments in terms of bandwidth consumption. The architecture uses a make-before-break principle for vertical handovers and bidirectional tunneling using various tunneling mechanisms connecting mobile nodes through access networks to a home network. Also, it proposes a packet inspection routine for timely handover execution in the home network.