Ubiquitous access to information anywhere, anytime and anyhow is an
important feature of future all-IP mobile communication networks, which
will interconnect various systems and be more dynamic and flexible. The
deployment of these networks, however, requires overcoming many challenges.
One of the main challenges of interest for this work is how to provide
Qual-ity of Service (QoS) guarantees in such highly dynamic mobile
environments.As known, mobility of Mobile Nodes (MNs) affects the QoS in
mobile networks since QoS parameters are made for end-to-end
communications. Therefore, it is a challenge to develop new solutions
capable of supporting seamless mobility while simultaneously providing QoS
guarantees after handoffs. Addressing this challenge is the main objective
of this dissertation, which provides a comprehensive overview of mobility
management solutions and QoS mech-anisms in IP-based networks followed by
an insight into how mobility management and QoS solutions can be coupled
with each other. Following the highlight of the state of art along with the
pros and cons of existing approaches, the dissertation concludes that
hybrid strategies are promising and can be further developed to achieve
solutions that are capable of simultaneous-ly supporting mobility and QoS,
simple from the implementation point of view, efficient and applicable to
future all-IP mobile communication networks.Based on this, the dissertation
proposes a new hybrid proposal named QoS-aware Mobile IP Fast
Authentication Protocol (QoMIFA). Our proposal integrates MIFA as a
mobility man-agement protocol with RSVP as a QoS reservation protocol. MIFA
is selected due to its capa-bility of the provision of fast, secure and
robust handoffs, while RSVP is chosen because it presents the standard
solution used to support QoS in existing IP-based networks. The hybrid
architecture is retained by introducing a new object, called “mobility
object”, to RSVP in or-der to encapsulate MIFA control messages.Following
the specification of the new proposal, the dissertation also evaluates its
perfor-mance compared to the well-known Simple QoS signaling protocol
(Simple QoS) by means of simulation studies modeled using the Network
Simulator 2 (NS2). The evaluation compris-es the investigation of the
impact of network load and MN speed. The performance measures we are
interested in studying comprise the resource reservation latency, number of
dropped packets per handoff, number of packets sent as best-effort per
handoff until the reservation is accomplished and probability of dropping
sessions. Our simulation results show that QoMIFA is capable of achieving
fast and smooth handoffs in addition to its capability of quickly
re-serving resources after handoffs. Considering the impact of network
load, QoMIFA outper-forms Simple QoS in all studied scenarios (low- ,
middle- and high-loaded scenarios). With respect to the impact of MN speed,
it can be observed that the impact of ping-pong effects is seen with both
protocols and results in higher resource reservation latency, more dropped
packets per handoff and more best-effort packets per handoff at low speeds
than at higher ones. The worst impact of ping-pong effects is seen at a
speed of 3 km/h when employing QoMIFA and Simple QoS, respectively.
However, QoMIFA remains performing significantly better than Simple QoS
under all studied MN speeds and can even properly serve MNs mov-ing at high
speeds.Following the simulative evaluation, the dissertation estimates the
signaling cost of both stud-ied protocols with respect to the location
update and packet delivery cost. Our results show that QoMIFA achieves the
above mentioned performance improvements at the cost of greater location
update cost and slightly higher packet delivery cost than Simple QoS.