Media independent handover enabled advanced mobility management and its functional mapping

In this paper, we propose a suitable set of protocols schematically combining both radio handover and IP handover for heterogeneous network with the enhancement of relay nodes, that is considered as an important feature of the future radio network. Based on that, we develop the functional allocation of media independent handover entities for a 4G communication system developed by the European WINNER project. The allocation is suitable for decentralized radio resource and mobility management as proposed by the system architecture evolution. Performance evaluation of the handover signaling delay for media independent handover enabled relay enhanced cells is presented. Conclusions derived from this work serve as a reference for the design of future radio network and the associated protocols.