802.21-MPA-IMS Architecture

Mobility has become a keyword nowadays with the evolution of mobile devices market and proliferation of real-time services. IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) is a single, standardized service framework that supports voice, video, data and messaging services, but does not provide seamless mobility for packet based sessions. This paper purposes an IMS architecture with IEEE 802.21 and media-independent pre-authentication (MPA) integrated. IEEE 802.21 can enable this seamless mobility in IMS and, additionally, MPA provides a secure handover optimization scheme, reducing, as a consequence, handover latency. The main goal of this architecture is to provide seamless and secure handovers between different access technologies in an IMS-based environment.