End-to-end mobility management solutions for TCP: An analysis

Today´s mobile devices are equipped with multiple network interfaces belonging to different access networks, these interfaces may be used in different requirements. A network connection should be established using the best possible interface. During communication, characteristics of a network may change or a new access network is reached by mobile node thus an already established connection should be moved from one interface to another or parallel transmission is done over two or more connections. In the last several years´ variety of mobility management solutions have been proposed that operate at different layers of the communication protocol stack (e.g link layer, network layer, transport layer and application layer), but the network and transport layer mobility management solutions are more mature. In this paper we have discussed various end-to-end mobility management solutions for TCP. We have also identified a number of evaluation parameters and on the basis of these parameters different mobility management techniques are analyzed.