A Comprehensive Tutorial for Mobility Management in Data Networks

The convergence towards the IP protocol has made Internet access available almost everywhere; this has leveraged new expectations about continuous and seamless communication, especially when portable devices are involved. Mobility management is a key issue in this context. The original IP specification does not account for mobility. Nevertheless, since the beginning of the Internet there has been a continuous interest in managing nomadic hosts; this has brought to a large number of approaches and protocols that have faced the problem from different perspectives. This paper reviews different approaches to mobility management that have arisen during the years. It is intended to serve as a tutorial for this topic, which draws out the lesson learned until now and depicts a comprehensive picture to foster new ideas and solutions while avoiding duplication of past work.