An approach for managing global mobility and roaming in the next-generation wireless systems

In the Next-Generation (NG) wireless systems, mobile users (MUs) will be able to move across various heterogeneous networks while using their mobile terminals (MTs) to communicate. It has been proven that this global roaming freedom significantly increases the network-signaling traffic. Several schemes have been recently proposed to reduce such a traffic. This paper presents an efficient approach which uses a special gateway called Wireless INterworking Gateway (WING) to facilitate interoperability between heterogeneous subsystems of the NG wireless systems. Results reveal that such an approach significantly improves the network performance, in terms of generated signaling traffic and response time during the global roaming process. (c) 2004 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.