Enhancing mobility management protocols to minimise AAA impact on handoff performance

In an all-IP-based network architecture that provides multimedia services for 3G and WLAN users, security provisioning is a paramount requirement. However, a security infrastructure (e.g., AAA) introduces additional impairments, in the form of delay components, to the total handoff performance crucially affecting the prime objective towards seamless and secure mobility. In this work, a Context Transfer solution is proposed, in order to support seamless and secure multimedia services over all-IP infrastructures. The solution acts as an adhesive between the AAA and mobility management entities by using the latter to forward AAA state information locally. In this solution, the mobility management protocol is used to trigger Context Transfer and additional messages have been introduced to carry the desired AAA context information. The results presented here show that the overall handoff delay is reduced significantly and a considerable improvement is seen in the performance of real-time and non-real-time applications.