QoS in Next Generation Mobile Networks: An Analytical Study

Two of the major challenges for next-generation mobile systems are to achieve seamless mobility management in next generation wireless networks and to manage resources efficiently given the exponential growth that mobile data traffic has experienced over the last few years. To track host mobility, the IETF has made important efforts to develop mobility management protocols such as Mobile IPv6 and Proxy Mobile IPv6. These protocols establish a tunnel to connect the mobile node with its correspondent node. The tunneling method provided by MPLS can be profitably used to take advantage of MPLS traffic engineering capabilities in order to achieve faster re-routing when a mobile node changes its point of attachment to the network. Moreover, in order to deal with increasing mobile traffic demand, mobility management network architectures are being redesigned towards a more distributed operation. Given these scenarios, service disruption during handoffs continues to cause excessive packet loss that needs minimizing in order to support quality of service requirements for emerging applications. In this paper, a qualitative and quantitative analyses of the most representative host-based and network-based mobility management approaches is presented, including recent distributed mobility management approaches.