Next generation mobility management

Recently, wireless and mobile communication networks have become increasingly popular and the huge number of smart mobile devices and applications has brought the mobile operators with challenges from various aspects. This trend will continue to affect the way in which we live, work, and play with many smart and innovative services, and the intensive mobility control messages and data will give great impact on the traditional wireless and mobile communication networks. For this reason, the mobility management support is one of very important issues for the future generation of wireless and mobile networks and services, and the design of efficient and robust mobility management is one of the most challenging research tasks. Observing the great need for an in-depth research of the mobility management in both academia and industry, we have put together this special issue through an open call for papers. More than 10 high-quality papers from all around the world were submitted. Although many of them were of high quality, we had room for only three papers that best fit the theme. To guarantee higher quality of this special issue, we also have selectively collected four expanded papers from the proceedings of MobiWorld 2008 workshop while inviting two comprehensive surveys. Accordingly, this special issue brings together nine papers. The first two papers are devoted to review and survey recent developments and methods of mobility management, and the others propose and analyze some of the most interesting and innovative solutions dealing with the mobility management in wireless mobile networks. The paper “Next generation mobility management: an introduction” by F. Richard Yu, Vincent W. S. Wong, JooHan Song, Victor C. M. Leung, and Henry C. B. Chan reviews recent research trend and developments in location management, and surveys methods for inter-system handover management between heterogeneous systems. It classifies the inter-system handover management schemes according to the protocol layer, so that the readers can gain in-depth insight into the topic. It also provides open problems and research direction for the next negation mobility management. Recently, communication devices are being installed in more and more vehicles and roadside infrastructure. In the near future, traveling vehicles will be able to communicate while forming rapidly changing ad hoc networks. The paper “Mobility and Handoff Management in Vehicular Networks: A Survey” by Kun Zhu, Dusit Niyato, Ping Wang, Ekram Hossain, and Dong In Kim presents a good comprehensive survey on existing mobility management works for both vehicle-to-vehicle and vehicleto-infrastructure communications in vehicular networks, and also provides several open research issues of the topic. The following four papers refer to the proxy mobile IPv6 (PMIPv6) which is a famous mobility management protocol recently standardized by IETF. PMIPv6 is a representative network-based localized mobility management protocol and has been of great interest to both academia and industry. Unlike host-based IP mobility management protocols, PMIPv6 does not require the participation of mobile nodes in mobility signaling. The paper “Implementation and analysis of proxy MIPv6” by Jianfeng Guan, Huachun Zhou, Zhiwei Yan, Yajuan Qin, and Hongke Zhang analyzes the singling cost of PMIPv6, provides their test-bed implement to evaluate its performance, and shows that its performance is better than the other mobility management protocols. The paper “Smart Buffering for seamless handover in Proxy Mobile IPv6” by Hyon-Young Choi, Kwang-Ryoul Kim, Hyo-Beom Lee, Sung-Gi Min, and Youn-Hee Han presents a PMIPv6 buffering scheme using only network-side information to prevent packet loss by proactively buffering packets that will be lost during handover, and also provides redundant packet elimination and packet reordering methods to minimize duplicate packet delivery and disruption of connection-oriented data flows. The paper “The applicability of virtual interface for intertechnology handovers in Proxy Mobile IPv6” by Ryuji Wakikawa, Sawako Kiriyama, and Sri Gundavelli analyzes the required software function on the mobile node for performing inter-technology handovers and investigates the applicability of virtual interface support available in Linux for implementing the PMIPv6-based inter-technology handover. The paper “QoS aware dynamic route optimization for Proxy Mobile IPv6 networks” by A. Dev Pragad, Vasilis Friderikos, Paul Pangalos, and A. Hamid Aghvami provides a QoS aware dynamic route optimization scheme where the network identifies the lower QoS sessions, and establishes a binding update with the correspondent node (CN) rather than with the LMA. The paper “A Cross-Layer Partner-Assisted Handoff Scheme for Hierarchical Mobile IPv6 in IEEE 802.16e Systems” by Yuh-Shyan Chen and Kun-Lin Wu presents a new partner-assisted handoff mechanism based on cross-layer approach by the combination of layer 2 and layer 3 in hierarchical mobile IPv6 which is a protocol standardized by IETF. The paper “Soft handoff support for SIP-NEMO: design, implementation, and performance evaluation” by