QoS in terminal-assisted mobility

Mobility management has been an important focus in recent years due to the growth of mobile users. Besides mobile IP (MIP) standard, there are many proposals for mobility support in the literatures such as application mobility using session initiation protocol (SIP) [1] and terminal-assisted mobility [2]. With the availability of many wireless access technologies, vertical mobility becomes an important focus to take advantage of the various technologies. With these various access technologies exhibit different characteristics in bandwidth, delay and coverage, the issue of maintaining users' perceived quality-of-service (QoS) across these technologies arises. Even though the availability of multiple technologies increase the coverage, the variability of bandwidth and delay introduces difficulties for applications to run while maintaining the QoS. This QoS issue is important considering the growth of mobile users and real-time applications in this mobile environment. In this paper, we propose a QoS framework in a mobility scenario to cater for applications that can adapt to the variability of bandwidth and delay across the different technologies, and also across different access points. Through our framework, end-to-end QoS signaling is facilitated between the terminals; adaptive applications thus can take advantages of this signaling to maintain users' perceived QoS.