Abstract
This thesis is a description of the research undertaken in the course of the PhD and evolves around a context transfer protocol which aims to complement and support mobility management in next generation mobile networks. Based on the literature review, it was identified that there is more to mobility management than handover management and the successful change of routing paths. Supportive mechanisms like fast handover, candidate access router discovery and context transfer can significantly contribute towards achieving seamless handover which is especially important in the case of real time services. The work focused on context transfer motivated by the fact that it could offer great benefits to session re-establishment during the handover operation of a mobile user and preliminary testbed observations illustrated the need for achieving this. Context transfer aims to minimize the impact of certain transport, routing, security-related services on the handover performance. When a mobile node (MN) moves to a new subnet it needs to continue such services that have already been established at the previous subnet. Examples of such services include AAA profile, IPsec state, header compression, QoS policy etc. Re-establishing these services at the new subnet will require a considerable amount of time for the protocol exchanges and as a result time- sensitive real-time traffic will suffer during this time. By transferring state to the new domain candidate services will be quickly re-established. This would also contribute to the seamless operation of application streams and could reduce susceptibility to errors. Furthermore, re-initiation to and from the mobile node will be avoided hence wireless bandwidth efficiency will be conserved. In this research an extension to mobility protocols was proposed for supporting state forwarding capabilities. The idea of forwarding states was also explored for remotely reconfiguring middleboxes to avoid any interruption of a mobile users' sessions or services. Finally a context transfer module was proposed to facilitate the integration of such a mechanism in next generation architectures. The proposals were evaluated analytically, via simulations or via testbed implementation depending on the scenario investigated. The results demonstrated that the proposed solutions can minimize the impact of security services like authentication, authorization and firewalls on a mobile user's multimedia sessions and thus improving the overall handover performance.