Mobility Management

Traditionally, mobility solutions deal mainly with handover of a user’s terminal between two base stations in an operator-controlled infrastructure caused by physical movement of the user. However, in future network scenarios developed within Ambient Networks (and elsewhere) the term “mobility” has to be treated in a much wider sense and involves the reactions of the system to any changes in the user and network environments, including changes in radio and network resources as well as commercial conditions or user preferences.

As a consequence, it is no longer possible to envisage a single mobility paradigm that can address this diverse set of requirements.  Instead, the concepts of mobility toolbox (a set of mobility solutions that can be flexibly combined to support specific mobility events – effectively providing a toolbox of mobility components that can be integrated on demand into a mobility solution suited to the handover environment) and separation of mobility triggers from the actual mobility management mechanism will be introduced (see Figure 1).

Figure 1: Framework for trigger processing in Ambient Networks

Further readings: "D4-3 Mobility Framework Mechanisms"

Technical Objectives