Comparison and Evaluation of the Most Efficient Mobility Management Protocols for Integrated Wireless Networks

The integration of complementary wireless technologies in order to achieve "anywhere, anytime and on any device" ubiquitous services is the core idea of Next Generation Networks (NGN). In order to achieve this goal the NON will integrate different network access technologies. One of the most attractive ideas is the design and implementation of a UMTS / WLAN interworking architecture. Mobility Management (MM) is a major factor towards a seamless provision of multimedia applications in such a heterogeneous environment. Although numerous solutions have been proposed so as to accomplish this object, the comparison of them has been less extensive mainly narrowed between extensions of the same protocol or different basic protocols. Moreover, little research has been done on MM protocols comparison in UMTS/WLAN integrated networks. In this article a comprehensive comparison between the most efficient approaches of well-known mobility protocols in UMTS/WLAN networks is presented.