Integrating Quality of Service and Mobility Support into Wireless Communication Networks

The evolving design of current fixed and mobile networks suggests that packet switching will become the primary technology to serve mobile multimedia applications. In order to operate satisfactorily, these applications require two distinct functions from the communication networks, namely mobility management and Quality of Service (QoS) support. Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM) and Internet Protocols (IP) are the two main packet switching technologies in use today, but neither of them can support mobile multimedia services. Considerable work has been done in recent years to advance these technologies, but many developments consider mobility management and QoS support as unrelated issues. Consequently, their proposed frameworks still cannot serve mobile multimedia applications. To provide solutions to the above issues, this thesis describes detailed methods of integrating these functions. To reduce complexity, this integration process can be divided into two tasks, namely how to make mobility management more QoS-aware; and how to make QoS support more mobility-aware. The first task has not been thoroughly explored in IP environments. To counter this, the thesis introduces a novel Home-Proxy based framework that handles mobility management across the Internet at the session layer. Thereby user mobility becomes transparent to the underlying QoS framework. Moreover, this framework offers other advantages such as adaptation services, centralised accounting and access control. To cope with frequent handovers in QoS-aware environments, we introduce a dual-level approach in both mobility management and resource allocation.