An integrated QoS, security and mobility framework for delivering ubiquitous services across all IP-based networks

With the advent of various access technologies and increasing number of applications, a set of challenges concerning efficient delivery of ubiquitous services to heterogeneous users and devices have been posed. One of the important challenges is to integrate quality of service (QoS), security and mobility support in heterogeneous networks. To facilitate the interworking of these mechanisms we propose the concept of enhanced node (EN) in this paper. The EN is an intelligent entity with a network sub-layer, which integrates QoS, security and mobility management (MM). ENs are located in the access network and they communicate with each other via signalling. In this paper, the functionalities of the ENs are described and the framework with ENs to integrate QoS, security and MM in IP-based networks is presented. The mechanisms to provide the authenticated and authorized access control and to enhance the secured QoS combined fast handovers are also proposed.