A survey of identity and handoff management approaches for the future Internet

Since its inception almost 40 years ago, the Internet has evolved and changed immensely. New technology solutions are desired to keep up with this unprecedented growth. Besides the traditional computing devices, different types of mobile devices need to be supported by the future Internet architecture. In this work, a survey of identity and handoff management solutions proposed in future Internet architectures is presented. Mobility protocols developed by the Internet Engineering Task Force initiatives are discussed to give the background on the user mobility support challenges with the current architecture. The next generation network architectures supported by global initiatives are presented and analyzed in terms of their support for seamless user and device mobility. Furthermore, this survey is extended to include the architectures proposed for wireless mesh networks, which are envisioned to be a part of the next generation networks with their self organizing and self configuring network characteristics.