Handling Mobility Management and QoS Aspects in All-IP Networks

It is well-known that all-IP networks will be more dynamic and should be more flexible than current networks. Deploying these networks requires, however, overcoming many challenges. One of the main challenges is how to provide Quality of Service (QoS) guarantees in such highly dynamic mobile environments. Addressing this challenge is the main focus of this paper, which provides an insight into how mobility management and QoS solutions can be coupled with each other. Moreover, the paper describes in detail the QoS-aware Mobile IP Fast Authentication Protocol (QoMIFA), which is capable of handling mobility management and simultaneously reserving resources, thus, satisfying the requirements of all-IP mobile communication networks. The paper evaluates also the performance of QoMIFA compared to the well-known Simple QoS signaling protocol (Simple QoS) by means of simulation studies modeled in the network simulator 2 (ns2). The evaluation comprises the investigation of the impact of the network load on both protocols. Our simulation results show that QoMIFA is capable of achieving fast and smooth handoffs in addition to its capability of reserving resources very quickly. With respect to the time required to reserve resources for uplink traffic, QoMIFA is up to 80% faster than Simple QoS. If the resources are reserved for downlink traffic, QoMIFA performs up to 93% better. Considering the number of dropped packets per handoff, QoMIFA reduces the packets lost per handoff by 22% up to 76% on uplink and by 55% up to 93% on downlink as compared to Simple QoS. A main advantage of QoMIFA is that it minimizes the packets sent as best-effort (without QoS guarantees) after handoffs. QoMIFA reduces the best-effort packets transmitted on downlink by approximately 94% compared to Simple QoS and eliminates these packets on uplink.