Network mobility management for next generation mobile systems

The future Internet will need to cater for an increasing number of powerful devices and entire groups of networks to roam in heterogeneous access networks. The current approach towards meeting such requirements, which is to retrofit mobility solutions to different layers of the protocol stack, has given rise to an increasingly fragmented network control layer. Furthermore, retrofitting solutions in an ad-hoc manner to the protocol stack does not provide consistent support from the network to different applications. This lack of a common control layer for facilitating roaming in heterogeneous networking environments represents a crucial challenge both technically and from a user perspective. To this end, a novel mobility architecture forms the basis and the first part of this dissertation.The work on investigating current network mobility solutions and improving these solutions if deemed necessary, in order to reuse within the novel mobility architecture constitutes the second part of this dissertation. The IETF standard protocol for network mobility was implemented and its performance was analysed on a real networking environment. This enabled to identify problems in the standard which affect the handover and routing performance. To address the identified routing and protocol header overheads of the standard network mobility protocol a novel optimal routing framework, OptiNets was proposed. To address the handover latency issues, optimizations to IPv6 network attachment were incorporated and also an access technology independent multiple interface Make-Before-Break handover mechanism was proposed. The viability of the OptiNets framework and the handover optimizations were demonstrated by analysis and by implementation. A more general external factor that affects the performance of mobile networks which is bandwidth scarcity of Wireless Wide Area Networks was addressed, by proposing a bandwidth fuelling architecture for on-board mobile networks. The feasibility of the bandwidth fuelling architecture was analysed by implementing a prototype and evaluating its performance