Future Prospects and Challenges of On-Demand Mobility Management Solutions

Generally, mobility management (MM) solutions are centralized, which means only one entity controls the mobility-related tasks of mobile nodes connected to the network. However, the massive number of users, rapid growth in the network traffic, and the recent developments regarding the architecture and capability of 5G networks forced multiple entities to perform the task of MM. Similarly, to fulfill the demand for the applications at the time of handoff, we have on-demand MM solutions. These solutions are designed to be adoptable to various service delivery use cases supported by future networks. In addition, they also have power-saving features that turn them off automatically, when all your devices are fully charged. Owing to stated features, we need to explore on-demand MM solutions and these solutions can provide divergent types of services according to the user’s demand. Therefore, in this paper, the importance and comparison of on-demand MM solutions with legacy mechanisms are presented, by keeping in view the merits and constraints of their contributions. Furthermore, the significance of the MM as a service (MMaaS) model is discussed in detail, which is used for the on-demand MM mechanism. In this model, the substantial characteristics of the granularity of services are also elaborated, which are intricately tangled with the adoptability, extensibility, and power-saving requirements of future wireless networks. Finally, we discuss the challenges, future prospects, and application areas of on-demand MM solutions for researchers and application developers.