Executive Summary:

Future of telecommunication networks is broadband, wireless, ubiquitous and personal access to a wide variety of applications. These applications are expected to be offered through next-generation all-IP network, consisting of several, potentially incompatible, wireless access technologies such as Wi-Fi, Wi-Max, WCDMA, etc. The increasing user desire to be ‘always connected’, even when they move from one access network to another leads to a challenging requirement for mobility management in order to ensure seamless mobility and services/session continuity.

The objective of this End-to-end Mobility Management Framework (EMF) project is to provide seamless connectivity across heterogeneous access networks. The framework that will be developed would include mechanisms, algorithms and components required to provide seamless mobility, enabling service continuity to applications. EMF aims at a comprehensive approach to provide seamless and pervasive end-to-end service, across and within heterogeneous network and develop a set of functions supporting multiple services. These functions may include network detection, network selection, inter-network handovers, location updates and connections with multiple access technologies simultaneously. This framework would also support data striping for bandwidth aggregation by simultaneously utilizing multiple network interfaces, resulting in better throughput and efficient resource utilization.

Key benefits of this project are given below:

• End users, having multihomed mobile devices, would be able to efficiently utilize these multiple network interfaces by having seamless continuation of services, or by using new services without any extra mobility support from the network.

• Seamless vertical handovers, that is focus of this project, would help to bridge the coverage gaps of different access networks, when an alternate is available.

• Bandwidth aggregation would enable end users to experience better throughput for data intensive applications, when overlapping network connectivity is available.

• EMF project documents and the source code will be released as open source thus enabling a large community to benefit from the outcomes of this project.