Mobility and QoS support in 4G wireless networks

Fourth-generation (4G) wireless networks will be the IP-based cellular networks integrating Internet with the existing cellular networks. Two important issues should be concerned in the IP-based cellular networks, IP mobility, and quality-of-service (QoS) guarantees. In this paper, we proposed two mechanisms to solve the problems with IP mobility and RSVP-based QoS provisioning. First, virtual-IP (VIP) allocation scheme in areas with a large rate of handoff can minimize the wireless signaling overhead due to IP mobility. The access routers (ARs) create dynamically the VIP zone by using the measured handoff rate derived from the history of the handoff into neighboring ARs. We show that VIP allocation scheme reduces the binding update messages in the wireless link than hierarchical mobile IPv6. Second, the new advance resource reservation protocol called proportional aggregate RSVP (PA-RSVP) can minimize waste of bandwidth and soft state refresh overhead due to IP mobility. It allocates the bandwidth in advance between the mobility anchor point and neighboring ARs using proportional aggregate reservation. We also show that PA-RSVP provides an improved performance over existing protocols.