Handover

Abstract: Mobile IPv6 enables a Mobile Node to maintain its connectivity to the Internet when moving from one Access Router to another, a process referred to as handover. During handover, there is a period during which the Mobile Node is unable to send or receive packets because of link switching delay and IP protocol operations. This "handover latency" resulting from standard Mobile IPv6 procedures, namely movement detection, new Care of Address configuration, and Binding Update, is often unacceptable to real-time traffic such as Voice over IP. Reducing the handover latency could be beneficial to non-real- time, throughput-sensitive applications as well. This document specifies a protocol to improve handover latency due to Mobile IPv6 procedures. This document does not address improving the link switching latency. This memo defines an Experimental Protocol for the Internet community.

Abstract: A traffic model and analysis for cellular mobile radio telephone systems with handoff are described. Three schemes for call traffic handling are considered. One is nonprioritized and two are priority oriented. Fixed channel assignment is considered. In the nonprioritized scheme the base stations make no distinction between new call attempts and handoff attempts. Attempts which find all channels occupied are cleared. In the first priority scheme considered, a fixed number of channels in each cell are reserved exclusively for handoff calls. The second priority scheme employs a similar channel assignment strategy, but, additionally, the queueing of handoff attempts is allowed. Appropriate analytical models and criteria are developed and used to derive performance characteristics. These show, for example, blocking probability, forced termination probability, and fraction of new calls not completed, as functions of pertinent system parameters. General formulas are given and specific numerical results for nominal system parameters are presented.

Abstract: TCP is a reliable transport protocol tuned to perform well in traditional networks where congestion is the primary cause of packet loss. However, networks with wireless links and mobile hosts incur significant losses due to bit-errors and hand-offs. This environment violates many of the assumptions made by TCP, causing degraded end-to-end performance. In this paper, we describe the additions and modifications to the standard Internet protocol stack (TCP/IP) to improve end-to-end reliable transport performance in mobile environments. The protocol changes are made to network-layer software at the base station and mobile host, and preserve the end-to-end semantics of TCP. One part of the modifications, called the snoop module, caches packets at the base station and performs local retransmissions across the wireless link to alleviate the problems caused by high bit-error rates. The second part is a routing protocol that enables low-latency handoff to occur with negligible data loss. We have implemented this new protocol stack on a wireless testbed. Our experiments show that this system is significantly more robust at dealing with unreliable wireless links than normal TCP; we have achieved throughput speedups of up to 20 times over regular TCP and handoff latencies over 10 times shorter than other mobile routing protocols.

Abstract: 5G networks are expected to be able to satisfy users' different QoS requirements. Network slicing is a promising technology for 5G networks to provide services tailored for users' specific QoS demands. Driven by the increased massive wireless data traffic from different application scenarios, efficient resource allocation schemes should be exploited to improve the flexibility of network resource allocation and capacity of 5G networks based on network slicing. Due to the diversity of 5G application scenarios, new mobility management schemes are greatly needed to guarantee seamless handover in network-slicing-based 5G systems. In this article, we introduce a logical architecture for network-slicing-based 5G systems, and present a scheme for managing mobility between different access networks, as well as a joint power and subchannel allocation scheme in spectrum-sharing two-tier systems based on network slicing, where both the co-tier interference and cross-tier interference are taken into account. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed resource allocation scheme can flexibly allocate network resources between different slices in 5G systems. Finally, several open issues and challenges in network-slicing-based 5G networks are discussed, including network reconstruction, network slicing management, and cooperation with other 5G technologies.