Mobility Management in WLAN-Based Virtualized Networks

Traditional network architectures are about to reach the limits of sustainable development for future service innovation and growth. To overcome the limitation of current architectures and efficiently redesign the future network architecture, a new technology called “network virtualization” is under development. In particular, wireless network virtualization is expected to become an emerging architectural choice to support concurrent heterogeneous services with finer controls over quality of service (QoS) features on the shared wireless network. We note that mobility management has a great influence on user-perceived QoS due to the service disruption during a handover process, and one of the main advantages of wireless network virtualization is to allow for finer-grained control of mobility policy. Although there have been several studies on wireless network virtualization, they focus on virtualizing the radio resources and the network devices. Therefore, in this paper, we propose a detailed protocol to support seamless mobility using the virtualization approach in the IEEE 802.11 wireless networks. We analyze the performance of the proposed mobility management scheme in terms of the handover latency and the signaling overhead. Analytical and simulation results demonstrate that the proposed scheme can significantly reduce handover latency with reasonable signaling cost compared to proxy mobile IP (PMIP) and fast handover for PMIP (FPMIP) in the traditional network.