A Multi-Layer Mobility Management Architecture Using Cross-Layer Signalling Interactions

Every layer of the mobile protocol stack contributes to next-generation advanced mobility management (MM). However, present MM architectures are largely single-layer specific and thus can hardly meet the simultaneous lowand high-level mobility support requirements. A co-operation of multiple layers would lead to a promising solution. Notably, there is an increasing interest to adopt cross-layer design for future wireless systems. Through this approach, the refined systems can obtain extended functionality and/or improved performance, which are hard to gain via a single-layer signalling. In this paper, we identify and abstract each layer’s contributions to various mobility support tasks. By introducing cross-layer interactions to the TCP/IP protocol stack, we present an IP-based multi-layer MM architecture taking advantage of contributions from individual and combined layers.