Abstract
Traditionally, cellular networks have not utilised IP based protocols for their mobility management. However, with the increasing demands of mobile Internet and IP based user applications, the cellular networks have started to evolve to be All-IP network. Adapting the IP based mobility management protocols to the IP based cellular network involves many challenging issues. In this context, this thesis addresses this challenging task to design purely IP based mobility management protocols for All-IP cellular networks. The thesis first investigates the signalling performance of the current tunnelling protocol based mobility management schemes in IP based cellular networks by the proposed OPNET based simulator. The results reveal that large signalling overhead is introduced by the tunnelling protocols based schemes for the handover process. Consequently to eliminate the disadvantages of current approaches, the thesis proposes a purely IP based mobility management scheme based on the Host Identity Protocol (HIP) and on a distributed mobility management architecture. Following this approach, a micro-mobility management scheme is proposed to reduce the extensive signalling exchanges of HIP based handover. Furthermore, a mobility context cache based approach is proposed to optimise the handover performance based on reducing the signalling exchanges during handover completion phase. The approach has been evaluated by applying to 3GPP based networks. Performance evaluation shows that the proposed optimisation can reduce both the handover interruption time for both 3 GPP standardised and proposed mobility management schemes. Finally, due to the lack of an accurate analytical model for the mobility management signalling analysis in the cellular networks, an analytical modelling framework is proposed. The results show that it can be used to predict the mobility management related signalling load with reasonable accuracy compared with the simulation results.