A Proposal for Enhancing the Mobility Management in the Future 3GPP Architectures

The management of the mobility between radio networks composed of heterogeneous radio technologies, called inter-access mobility management, provides the capability to tie together heterogeneous radio networks into an integrated network. The 3GPP architectures with well-designed inter-access mobility management capabilities are a part of the solution to cope with the growth of the mobile data traffic. This paper reviews the 3GPP architectures to highlight those with these capabilities. In order to evaluate if the mobility management is well-designed into these architectures, the authors describe the phases making up the management of the mobility and design an evaluation grid to assess the integration of these phases into the highlighted architectures. Since the assessment shows the existence of loopholes in the design of the inter-access mobility management, this paper proposes to enhance the 3GPP architectures by implementing a method called Hierarchical and Distributed Handover.