An autonomic mobility management solution for the future wireless Internet

The recent development of a myriad of heterogeneous wireless technologies that share the same core IP is driving the mobility as a key issue for the future wireless Internet. One of the critical challenges is to support uninterrupted and seamless multimedia services while on the move. This article focuses on mobility management in the future Internet regarding a solution proposed in the Autonomic Internet (AutoI) project. Our mobility management solution aims at enhancing user mobility experience and enabling adaptability and context awareness in the future wireless Internet. This is achieved through the use of more adequate information exploited by a utility-based mobility decision approach as well as a hysteresis margin to preserve decision stability. The proposed solution is discussed and experimental validations are performed to evaluate its impact on real-world scenarios. The proposed solution has been demonstrated to be effective in providing seamless user experience even with frequent handovers. Further, the use of the hysteresis-based mobility decision solution has been effective to reduce the number of handovers, without precluding the quality of connections.