Mobility management reconsideration: hierarchical model and flow control methodology

Mobility management is the fundamental technology to enable the seamless access to wireless networks and mobile services. Mobile IP is currently the most promising solution for mobility management in the Internet. The objective of this paper is to reconsider Mobile IP based mobility management solutions, with the emphasis on the proposal of new mobility management architectures. First, it is recognized that Mobile IP lacks flexibility with respect to the transparent and mandatory mobility support to various applications. This leads to a flexible hierarchical architecture proposal on the basis of optional mobility mechanisms at different protocol layers. Another problem occurs when multiple interfaces are available to one user device to access heterogeneous networks. In this case flow level traffic control is needed in addition to device level mobility management. A novel architecture for the multi-connectivity management is proposed to address this problem.