A seamless and proactive end-to-end mobility solution for roaming across heterogeneous wireless networks

Roaming across heterogeneous wireless networks such as wireless wide area network (WWAN) and wireless local area network (WLAN) poses considerable challenges, as it is usually difficult to maintain the existing connections and guarantee the necessary quality-of-service. This paper proposes a novel seamless and proactive end-to-end mobility management system, which can maintain the connections based on the end-to-end principle by incorporating an intelligent network status detection mechanism. The proposed system consists of two components, connection manager (CM) and virtual connectivity (VC). The CM, by using novel media access control-layer and physical-layer sensing techniques, can obtain accurate network condition, while at the same time reducing the unnecessary handoff and ping-pong effect. The VC can make mobility transparent to applications without additional network-layer infrastructure support using a local connection translation, and can handle mobility well in the network address translator and simultaneous movement cases using a subscription/notification service. The proposed system enjoys several unique advantages: 1) capable of reacting to roaming events proactively and accurately; 2) maintaining the connection's continuity with small handoff delay; and 3) being a unified end-to-end approach for both IPv4 and IPv6 networks. We have built a prototype system and performed experiments to demonstrate the advantages of the proposed system.