Laurent Marchand

A potential evolution of the policy and charging control/QoS architecture for the 3GPP IETF-based evolved packet core

The 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) Release 8 defines the specifications of a low latency, high-data rate all-IP Core Network (CN) capable of supporting real-time packet services over multiple access technologies, including the new Long-Term Evolution (LTE) access network. The mobile communications industry is maturing. In order to remain competitive many operators now focus on reducing their capital and operational expenditures (CAPEX and OPEX), by outsourcing some of their business activities and/or by sharing some network infrastructures. This article presents a possible evolution of the 3GPP Policy and Charging Control (PCC) and Quality of Service (QoS) architecture to better support Fixed-Mobile Convergence (FMC) and more flexible CN sharing solutions. This goal is achieved with a clearer separation of the business roles (e.g. access and network providers) and the introduction of a Network Policy Function (NPF) for the management of the CN.

Optimization of Handover Performance for Fmipv6

This paper presents a new protocol, namely Access Routers Tunneling Protocol (ARTP), dedicated to pre-configuring bidirectional secure tunnels among adjacent access routers before handoff. This protocol allows two tunnel endpoints to negotiate quality of service-related parameters, traffic classification aspects, security policies, such as authentication and encryption methods, buffering mechanism, etc. Once the parameters of pre-established runnels are determined, real-time traffic could be redirected in a cost-efficient way to mobile users using GRE (Generic Routing Encapsulation) tunneling technique. This protocol allows us to optimize handover performance for FMIPv6. An existing analytical model is used to evaluate the performance of the proposed handover procedure. Numerical results show that our new approach has better performance than FMIPv6 in terms of signaling cost, and the buffer size required during handoff.

A New Seamless Method to Support CDMA2000/WLAN Vertical Handover

This paper proposes a new protocol, Access Routers Tunneling Protocol, to facilitate seamless vertical handoff between wireless LAN and CDMA2000 access networks. A novel approach called seamless vertical handover for mobile IPv6 (SVHO) is defined to allow a mobile node to resume its real-time ongoing session with its correspondent as soon as it attaches to the new link. Traffic in progress will be redirected to the new network using mobile users previous care-of-address through preconfigured bidirectional tunnels. By this means, the service disruption for an ongoing real-time session could be minimized. Moreover, since the context information for the session in progress run by the mobile is kept intact at the previous access router, the delay variation (jitter) is reduced significantly during handoff. To provide certain quality of service to roaming users, new functionalities are added at access router so that it can perform not only local resource management but also call admission control as the mobile moves between subnets. To evaluate the performance, the components of handover latency are identified to demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach. Numerical results show that our new method has better performance than the brute-force handoff, the seamless handoff and the optimized seamless handoff scheme existing in the literature