Mobility and mobility management: a conceptual framework

The tremendous demands from social market are pushing the development of mobile communications faster than ever before, leading to plenty of new techniques emerging. Within those techniques, mobility management has widely been recognized as one of the most important problems for a seamless access to wireless networks and services. This paper proposes a conceptual framework for mobility and mobility management, with the emphasis on the key research issues involved in the effort of a graceful design of mobility management schemes. The effects of mobility on both architectures and protocols of networks and communications are presented. Diversity of the future mobile communication systems introduces new challenges, which lead to the definitions of mobility on various levels according to different granularities. Mobility management is defined as two complementary operations, i.e. location management and handoff management. The paper also describes the mobility management issues at the network layer. The processing stages of the two operations are introduced respectively, together with the analyses of key research issues and possible solutions. Finally, the issues about the performance evaluation of mobility management schemes are discussed.