Policy-based mobility in heterogeneous networks

The importance of mobility in networks is being increased together with the number of mobile users and applications. However, we still do not have broadly accepted solutions for mobility in Internet or other type of networks. In particular, mobility is difficult in heterogeneous networks, where heterogeneity could expand over ownership, administration, technology, and so on. We propose policy-based approach as the best and more realistic way to support mobility for heterogeneous networks. Policies express the interests of corresponding domains. Therefore, the accordance among various policies will enable inter domain mobility that satisfies all involved parts in networking. We extend our Architecture for Heterogeneous Multi Domain networks with policy-based support for mobility. We show that by applying a policy-based approach, mobility is supported as trade-off among different aspects, depending on the respective administrations’ goals. We illustrate such capability by showing how trade-offs among security and network performance can be designed and obtained.