Mobile flow-aware networks for mobility and QoS support in the IP-based wireless networks

As the volume of mobile traffic consisting of video, voice, and data is rapidly expanding, a challenge remains with the mobile transport network, which must deliver data traffic to mobile devices without degrading the service quality. Since every Internet service holds its own service quality requirements, the flow-aware traffic management in fine granularity has been widely investigated to guarantee Quality of Service (QoS) in the IP networks. However, the mobile flow-aware management has not been sufficiently developed yet because of the inherent constraints of flow routing in the mobile networks regarding flow-aware mobility and QoS support. In this paper, we propose a flow-aware mobility and QoS support scheme called mobile flow-aware network (MFAN) for IP-based wireless mobile networks. The proposed scheme consists of dynamic handoff mechanisms based on QoS requirements per flow to reduce the processing overhead of the flow router while ensuring QoS guarantee to mobile flows. The performance analyses of the proposed scheme demonstrate that MFAN successfully supports the mobile flow traffic delivery while satisfying the QoS requirement of flows in the wireless mobile IP networks.