A survey on handover management in mobility architectures

Abstract

This work presents a comprehensive and structured taxonomy of available techniques for managing the handover process in mobility architectures. Representative works from the existing literature have been divided into appropriate categories, based on their ability to support horizontal handovers, vertical handovers and multihoming. We describe approaches designed to work on the current Internet (i.e. IPv4-based networks), as well as those that have been devised for the "future" Internet (e.g. IPv6-based networks and extensions). Quantitative measures and qualitative indicators are also presented and used to evaluate and compare the examined approaches. This critical review provides some valuable guidelines and suggestions for designing and developing mobility architectures, including some practical expedients (e.g. those required in the current Internet environment), aimed to cope with the presence of NAT/firewalls and to provide support to legacy systems and several communication protocols working at the application layer. application level. While throughput remains a major goal of system design, the main concern of mobility architectures is how to best manage situations where a MN changes network. This event is currently referred to as handover (or handoff ).By default, current operating systems installed on smartphones adopt the following strategy for data transmission: one Network Interface Card (NIC) at a time is configured and employed to send data. If a WiFi network is available, the terminal switches to WiFi; otherwise a cellular network is utilized, if the latter is available too. During the handover, communications are interrupted. While the widespread use of current smartphones confirms that in general such a simple approach may be a viable solution, in some cases this strategy has some severe limitations. Just as an example (which is actually a true story), let us consider the case of an employee working in an institution/company composed of several buildings, all covered by a WiFi network (e.g. a researcher in a university campus). Suppose that the researcher is a commuter and, just before leaving for going home, he/she receives an important Voice over IP (VoIP) phone call. Since he needs to leave to take the last train home, he decides to answer the call using his/her mobile phone; today, there are plenty of smartphone apps that offer very efficient VoIP services. At that moment, the device is connected through WiFi, but when he gets out of the building, the WiFi signal is lost and the smartphone automatically switches to 4G without any handover management at the application level, thus experiencing a first communication interruption. While moving, he passes through other buildings (hence, within their WiFi coverage); as a consequence, the smartphone switches back to WiFi (i.e. a second communication interruption occurs), and then back to 4G (i.e. yet another communication interruption) and so on. One might suggest that the employee should turn off the WiFi NIC before leaving, thus using the cellular...

Accurate and Efficient Measurements of IP Level Performance to Drive Interface Selection in Heterogeneous Wireless Networks

“…Eq. (3) relates the tunnel loss probability ploss with the false alarm probability pfp for different values of K, the number of consecutive probes that need to be lost before declaring the tunnel down (TTO = K TKA). Obviously for a given K, pfp increases with ploss.…”

“…At the network layer, a number of metrics can be measured, from the simpler ones like bandwidth, delay and packet loss to more complex ones like network reliability, security, cost, and load. Most approaches (see [3] and references therein) focus on the architectural and protocol aspects of mobility management and provide little or no details on the underlying measurements procedure. For instance, in [23] the authors consider an architecture for network mobility within the context of the IETF NEMO (Network Mobility) WG and only mention that "There are a number of metrics that can be measured, with the most common being QoS metrics such as bandwidth, delay and packet loss".…”

“…The impact on these procedures on the processing load of Mobile Hosts and of Mobility Management Nodes and on the network load needs to be carefully assessed. From the analysis of the literature on mobility management (see the surveys [1], [2], [3]) we believe that these aspects have not been adequately covered so far. Most of the papers deal with architectural and protocol aspects of handover management, and/or focus on the performance of the handover procedure itself, but do not address the measurements procedures themselves which are needed to drive the interface selection and their computational and network load impact.…”

“…This work has been done mostly from the perspective of network management. Based on our analysis of requirements for the needed connectivity check and performance measurements procedures (see section 3), we realized that no existing tools provides a solution which is efficient for our purposes and can be easily integrated into a handover management system for Mobile Host and Mobility Management nodes. For this reason, we designed and implemented the solutions proposed in this paper.…”

Distributed hybrid simulation of the Internet of things and smart territories

“…Otherwise, some ad hoc solution should be dynamically built, with producers that exploit their smart devices (eg, smartphones) to build multihop wireless communication and information dissemination strategies . Moreover, in case of intermittent connections, seamless communication strategies should be employed using multihoming . Message dissemination about the market (eg, advertisements and general information) might be viably performed using some kind of epidemic dissemination protocol over a dynamic, opportunistic ad hoc overlay, used in conjunction with application filtering techniques.…”