Mobility Challenges and Management in the Future Wireless Heterogeneous Networks

Introduction

Mobility management as an important issue in current and future wireless heterogeneous environments has been got growing concern and many mobility management schemes have been proposed in the past few years (Zhu, 2010). The mobility can be classified into terminal mobility, session mobility, personal mobility and service mobility based on the different mobile entities (Strang, 2005). Terminal mobility happens when a terminal changes its attachment to the network, which may cause the change of the IP configuration. Here the terminal can be a traditional cellular device or a portable device such as notebook. Personal mobility means that a user can be globally reachable by unique personal identifier and originate or receive a service by accessing to any authorized terminals. While the session mobility is similar to the personal mobility which uses the different devices with diverse characteristics while maintaining state or transferring the session from one host to another. As for the service mobility, it enables a user to obtain subscribed and personalized services consistently even if connected to a foreign network service provider anytime and anywhere.

In this chapter we mainly concern on the terminal mobility which allows a device to move between subnets while being reachable to other host to maintain the ongoing communication. The objective of this chapter is to investigate the mobility management challenges and the relevant solutions under future wireless heterogeneous environments, and to analyze their development trends and future directions.