In recent years multitechnology-enabled terminals have become available. Such multimode terminals pose new challenges to mobility management. In order to address some of these challenges, the IEEE is currently working on a new specification on media-independent handover services (IEEE 802.21 MIH). The main aim of this specification is to improve user experience of mobile terminals by enabling handovers between heterogeneous technologies while optimizing session continuity. In this article we provide an overview of the current status of the IEEE 802.21 specification.

An important requirement for Internet protocol (IP) networks to achieve the aim of ubiquitous connectivity is network mobility (NEMO). With NEMO support we can provide Internet access from mobile platforms, such as public transportation vehicles, to normal nodes that do not need to implement any special mobility protocol. The NEMO basic support protocol has been proposed in the IETF as a first solution to this problem, but this solution has severe performance limitations. This paper presents MIRON: Mobile IPv6 route optimization for NEMO, an approach to the problem of NEMO support that overcomes the limitations of the basic solution by combining two different modes of operation: a Proxy-MR and an address delegation with built-in routing mechanisms. This paper describes the design and rationale of the solution, with an experimental validation and performance evaluation based on an implementation

This article surveys the major existing approaches and proposes a novel architecture to support mobile networks in network-based, localized mobility domains. Our architecture enables conventional terminals without mobility support to obtain connectivity either from fixed locations or mobile platforms (e.g., vehicles) and move between them, while keeping their ongoing sessions. This functionality offers broadband Internet access in automotive scenarios such as public transportation systems, where users spend time both in vehicles and at stations. The key advantage of our proposal, as compared with current alternatives, is that the described mobile functionality is provided to conventional IP devices that lack mobility functionality. We also performed an experimental evaluation of our proposal that shows that our architecture improves the quality perceived by the end users.