Unified Mobility Manager: enabling efficient SIP/UMTS mobile network control

Internet telephony is viewed as an emerging technology not only for wireline networks, but also for third-generation wireless networks. Although IP end to end is considered the ultimate approach to future wireless voice services, there is still a long way to go before IP voice packets can be effectively transported over the air. Therefore, Internet telephony and today's circuit-switched wireless network will coexist for years to come, and it is essential to effectively perform interworking between these networks. This article proposes the Unified Mobility Manager (UMM) that achieves efficient interworking between traditional wireless networks and Internet telephony networks. The main characteristic of the UMM is that it combines UMTS HLR and SIP proxy functionality in one logical entity, which helps eliminate the performance degradation due to interworking between SIP and UMTS. This article identifies seven potential network architectures with and without the UMM and with varying degrees of IP penetration in the wireless core networks, and performs comparative analysis in terms of their call setup signaling latency. Our performance results show that for SIP originated calls, the architecture with the UMM can achieve better performance than existing UMTS networks without the UMM. Our results further show that when the backbone network is fully IP-enabled, dramatic performance gains can be accomplished with the UMM for PSTN originated calls as well as for SIP originated calls. The article also demonstrates that the UMM allows graceful migration from today's circuit-switched wireless networks to hybrid SIP/circuit-switched wireless networks, and toward the IMS architecture for all-IP UMTS networks in the future.