Mobility Concepts for IMT-Advanced

The rapid advent of different wireless technologies has posed several new challenges and requirements which current architectures are not able to appropriately deal with. The growing presence of heterogeneous access networks, together with the increasing demands from the end-users, require a re-thinking of current access selection algorithms and appropriate management mechanisms (energy-saving, robustness and spectrum efficiency, etc). All these features have gathered the interest from the scientific community, but many of available works lack from an holistic approach, which we deem necessary considering the broad range of aspects to be addressed. The “Mobility concepts for IMT-Advanced” (MOBILIA) project, belonging to the Celtic programme, specifically tackles this, by looking at the whole system (from lower layers up to services and networking). This paper presents the most remarkable findings and results obtained during the project life time.