Evaluation of strategies for supporting personal mobility and service portability

In addition to terminal mobility enabled by mobile cellular networks, future telecommunication systems must also provide for appropriate capabilities to support personal and session mobility as well as service portability. To cope with the strong user requirements concerning service provision and mobility support, future service architectures can be regarded as global distributed systems in which billions of mobile objects move and interact to optimally support the user. Based on this scenario, the paper proposes localization and positioning strategies for objects. To realize location transparency between them, the concept of location bridges is introduced, which enables to dynamically implement arbitrary localization strategies. Using different combinations of localization and positioning strategies, the realization of service portability and personal mobility is demonstrated in the context of the TINA service architecture. Finally, the approaches presented are compared by a performance evaluation.