A Unified Mobility and Session Management Platform for Next Generation Mobile Networks

This paper presents a novel approach towards realizing a unified mobility and session management platform for next generation mobile networks at the core network level. In particular, this framework enables a common platform for interworking between universal mobile telecommunications system (UMTS), CDMA2000 technology, and wireless local area networks (WLANs). Within the proposed interworking architecture, the IP multimedia subsystem (IMS) is used as a universal coupling mediator for real-time session negotiation and management over a mobile IP (MIP) based IP mobility management framework. Despite numerous architectural challenges on how IMS and MIP may contribute for session management and IP mobility, the proposed framework achieves this with minimal changes to the existing standards. The paper concludes by presenting simulation results obtained for validating this model using an OPNET based model.