Mobility Challenges and Management in the Future Wireless Heterogeneous Networks

With the development of the various network technologies, the mobility management as a growing concern issue has been one of the most expected features in the future wireless heterogeneous networks environments. Both academia and the industry look forward to the deployment of mobility support, but none of the proposed solutions have been adopted in the large scale due to the various impediments. This chapter investigates the mobility challenges and management in the wireless heterogeneous environment, gives a brief description of the current mobility management solutions, and provides a comparison of the different solutions including their advantages and disadvantages. The organization of this chapter is as follows: It begins by analyzing the mobility challenges under the multi-accessing wireless heterogeneous environments. Next the chapter gives a brief introduction of the mobility management. Afterwards it introduces the state-of-art of the mobility management solutions and describes the respective approaches and compares their advantages and disadvantages. The last section concludes this chapter. DOI: 10.4018/978-1-4666-0017-1.ch002