A new perspective on mobility management scenarios and approaches

Abstract

Currently and in the future, users demand for ubiquitous network connection to interact with the world. Moreover, the mobile devices are increasingly widespread and are better equipped in terms of access connections and services support. Mobility management is therefore an intrinsic feature of mobile networks; however, it is not yet ready to support the so called User-provided networks (UPNs), where the network elements can be devices controlled by regular users, or providers, and share subscribed access. In these scenarios, mobility has to be rethought to consider user-centric approaches. This paper discusses the efficiency and applicability of current mobility assumptions in user-centric scenarios, discussing their requirements and solutions addressing several types of networks that may exhibit user-centric characteristics. It also identifies the fundamentals of a user-centric mobility management architecture able to efficiently deal with the dynamicity of the aforementioned scenarios. © 2011 ICST Institute for Computer Science, Social Informatics and Telecommunications Engineering.