Policy-Based Mobility Management for Heterogeneous Networks

Next generation communications will be composed of flexible, scalable and context-aware, secure and resilient architectures and technologies that allow full mobility of the user and enable dynamic management policies that ensure end-to-end secure transmission of data and services across heterogeneous infrastructures and networks. This paper investigates the policy-based mobility management scheme proposed for the WINNER system. The scheme is based on previously developed cooperation radio resource management (RRM) algorithms including mobility management, for the successful interworking of WINNER with new and legacy systems. The paper describes the cooperation architecture and mobility management functionalities and the rules that are applied for the support of mobility within the above scenarios. The rules are applied to solve problems such as: who and what can access which resources and on which network, what is the highest and lowest priority traffic, what are the levels in between, and how are they differentiated, how do we guarantee delivery of highest priority traffic (e.g., real-time applications), how can we guarantee the required for the delivery bandwidth, when and which traffic can we discard? In addition, based on the QoS demand, location determination can also be scaled into different levels by using different positioning methods. Further, the paper describes other actions executed by the implemented policy-based mobility management scheme. These actions include radio access technology (RAT) association, user and flow context transfer, handover decision, and deployment priority.