On fundamental concept of mobility for mobile communications

The tremendous demands from social market are pushing the booming development of mobile communications faster than ever before, leading to plenty of new advanced techniques emerging. Mobile communi-cations are changing people’s life style in many ways. Behind the scenario, the fantastic characteristic that makes this reality is mobility. This paper studies the basic concepts of mobility for mobile communications, with the attempts of trying to answer the fundamental questions on mobility. A conceptual discussion is made on mobility in the contexts of both computation and communication leading to the illustration of mobile computing. The effects of mobility on both architectures and protocols of networks and communications are analysed. The concept and operations of mobility management for mobile communications are also introduced. New challenges arise in future mobile communications systems with the diversity as the key feature, which lead to the definitions of classified mobility according to different granularities.