Mobile IP Framework for Seamless Global Roaming Across Heterogeneous Networks.

With the appearance of more and more bandwidth consuming applications in today's mobile data services market, telecom operators can no longer rely on price to attract and retain subscribers. Seamless roaming has become an important value-added service for improving back-end billing, subscriber relationships, bandwidth preservation through aggregation, quality of service and revenue generation. The paper presents the Mobile IP framework and methodology for supporting seamless global roaming within a geographic mobility domain. The goals and challenges of secured and seamless roaming solution are investigated. The responsibility of individual layers of the TCP/IP protocol stack is ill-defined with respect to mobility. The paper highlights the need for an adaptive generic algorithm to select, optimize and maintain transparent network connectivity for mobile users on the move, despite changing connection types and locations in a heterogeneous network environment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]