All-SIP Mobility: Session Continuity on Handover in Heterogeneous Access Environment

Given the high performance of recent access networks and mobile terminals, it has become feasible for mobile nodes to support multiple ongoing sessions while they are moving. However, in the heterogeneous access network environment, the IP addresses of mobile nodes are forced to change when they switch networks. In this paper, we introduce a simple network platform on which inter-network handover can be efficiently realized. We then propose the SIP-MIP controlled mobility architecture, which prevents QoS degradation of real-time sessions while keeping TCP connections alive. We also propose the all-SIP mobility architecture; it literally uses only SIP components to maintain both TCP and UDP sessions. The proposed architecture eliminates the cost issue and residual drawbacks of using MIP. In addition, both architectures require little or no modification on the server side, which makes them more cost effective and easier to deploy on existing infrastructure.