Autonomicity in distributed mobility management

With the mobile network core evolving towards an unlayered and decentralized architecture, the traditional centralized mobility management mechanisms are becoming more and more inefficient. In this paper, an autonomic flat IP mobility management approach (A-FLIP) is proposed. It enforces the mobility management and autonomicity to the “cloud” of distributed gateways. In A-FLIP, mobility management related information is maintained in the distributed gateways at the network edge, and multiple decision elements are integrated in these gateways. Hence, autonomic behaviors like self-configuration and self-healing can be realized in the distributed mobility management systems. A prototype of A-FLIP has been implemented and an experimental network consisting of commercial and educational network has been established. Experimental results have demonstrated that A-FLIP is an efficient mechanism for mobility management oriented to the future mobile network architecture.