Mobility management for seamless flow of real time information in wireless networks

Abstract

Following the explosive growth of the Internet during the last two decades, the current unprecedented expansion of wireless technology promises an even greater effect on how people communicate, interact and enjoy their entertainment.. Wireless networks become increasingly interoperable with each other and with the high-speed wired networks. This reflects a paradigm shift towards new generations of mobile networks where seamless mobility across heterogeneous networks becomes fundamental. This generation is referred to as fourth generation (4G). Future users will be always best connected through different available access networks when they move from one place to another. In fact, users can access and maintain a seamless connectivity anywhere, anytime via any access technology owned by any operator to use any available service. This work concentrates on mobility management for accommodating continuous service to mobile users through estimating resource requirements of potential handoff connections. A diverse mix of heterogeneous traffic with diverse resource requirements is considered. Also this investigates static and dynamic resource allocation schemes. The dynamic scheme probabilistically estimates the potential number of connections that will be handed off from neighboring cells, for each class of traffic. The performance of these strategies in terms of connection blocking probabilities for handover and local new connection requests are evaluated. In short, the objective of this thesis is to optimize the inter-system mobility management, mainly between 3GPP and WLAN/WiMAX networks, by addressing the aspects: interworking and roaming architecture; access network selection; inter-system measurement; required cell overlap; handover initiation; handover prediction-based adaptive streaming application and load balancing. The ultimate goal is to explore different directions to achieve the seamless mobility in the future converged 4G networks and propose efficient solutions.