Architectural Solutions for End-User Mobility

Abstract

Mobility is a major innovation of the last decades that came with wireless networking. Architectural mobility solutions can range from single node mobility architectural aspects, up to solutions for the whole (mobile) network. In mesh networks, end-user mobility requires supporting seamless vertical (among different type of networks) and horizontal (among networks of the same type) handovers between different domains (inter domain handoff or macro-mobility) or inside the same domain (intra-domain handoff or micro-mobility). In sensor networks, mobility is more related to link state evaluation, and support of dynamic procedures for reconnecting the network. In this chapter we focus on the architectural solutions for supporting mobility in wireless mesh networks and sensor networks, their issues, characteristics and related performance.