Seamless Roaming: Developments and Challenges

The chapter reports on recent developments and challenges focused on seamless handover. These are subject for the research projects MOBICOME and PERIMETER, recently granted by the EU EUREKA and EU STREP FP7, respectively. The research projects are considering the recently advanced IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS), which is a Set of technology standards put forth by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) and two Third Generation Partnership Project groups, namely 3GPP and 3GPP2. The foundation of seamless handover is provided by several components, the most important ones being the handover, mobility management, connectivity management and Internet mobility. The paper provides an intensive analysis of these components