A predictive mobility management algorithm for wireless mobile computing and communications

Abstract

This paper describes a novel predictive mobility management algorithm for supporting mobile computing and communications. Traditionally, mobility management includes functions to passively keep track of the location of the users/terminals and to maintain connections to the terminals belonging to the system. To make intelligent mobile-aware applications, it is important that a mobile terminal/system be more intelligent and can anticipate the change of the location of its user. We propose an aggressive mobility management scheme, called predictive mobility management. A mobile motion prediction algorithm predicts the "future" location of a mobile user according to the user's movement history, i.e., previous movement patterns. By combining the predictive mobility management algorithm with a mobility agent scheme, the service and user data structure can be actually pre-connected and pre-assigned at the locations to which the user is moving. Thus, the user can immediately receive service or data with virtually the same efficiency as at the previous location. Simulations show that the prediction efficiency of the proposed algorithm is about 95%.