On End-to-End Mobility Management in 4G Heterogeneous Wireless Networks

With the advent of modern technology, mobile devices with multi homed capabilities are proliferating. Existence of different network interfaces in multi homed devices enables them to seamlessly roam across heterogeneous networks. These vertical handovers however, causes to affect the TCP connections. Many solutions exist that handle this problem caused by mobility of the nodes. However, current mobility management solutions either require support of additional entities in the network or require changes in current implementation of TCP. This paper argues that mobility management service can effectively be provided without requiring the support of additional entities in the network and without changing the current implementation of TCP. On the basis of this principle, we present an end-to-end mobility management framework (EMF) that overcomes the limitations of current mobility management solutions and provides a richer set of mobility services such as location updates, soft handover, willful handover, etc.