A Predictive Mobility Management Scheme for Supporting Wireless Mobile Computing

This report describes a novel predictive mobility management algorithm for supporting global mobile data accessing. Traditionally, mobility management includes functions to passively keep track of the location of the users/terminals and to maintain connections to the terminals belonging to the system. To make intelligent mobile-aware applications, it is important that a mobile terminal be more intelligent and can anticipate the change of the location of its user. We propose an aggressive mobility management scheme, called predictive mobility management. A mobile motion prediction algorithm predicts the " future " location of a mobile user according to the user's movement history, i.e., previous movement patterns. By combining the predictive mobility management algorithm with mobile-floating agent functions[9‚12], the service and user data are actually pre-connected and pre-assigned at the locations to which the user is moving. Thus, the user can immediately receives service or data with virtually the same efficiency as at the previous location, i.e., without encountering a large " handover " delay before service or data is available.