Towards a Complete Solution to Mobility Management for Next-Generation Wireless System

While the 3G wireless system is still under deployment world-wide, pilot research has been targeted to the next generation (NG), whose full scope is not yet well defined. One feature of NG should be its heterogeneous communication environment, where different generation cellular systems coexist and various wireless access networks and corresponding services are used. Advanced mobility management (MM) is thus needed to fulfil seamless global roaming in terms of not only the traditional terminal mobility, but the high-level personal, session and service mobility. In this paper, we discuss mobility management in previous, current and future mobile generations. We then present our vision of the NG framework and propose an approach leading towards a complete mobility management solution from the protocol stack and network architecture perspectives. We conclude with a series of associated open research problems in this hot research area.