The advancement of smartphones and tablets, combined with recent upgrades to the cellular infrastructure, has paved the way for an explosion of mobile Internet traffic. Video traffic in particular is increasing tremendously and will soon reach 86 percent of global consumer Internet traffic. Therefore, offloading traffic to Wi-Fi networks has become an interesting field to explore for researchers, innovators, standards-developing organizations (SDOs), telecom equipment companies, and telecom operators. At the same time, previously defined centralized mobility management solutions have proven that they do not scale well enough and are not as cost efficient as desired.

The contribution of this paper is a host-based Internet protocol (IP) mobility support protocol that utilizes distributed mobility anchors placed around the access network. The authors compare their proposal with existing approaches like mobile IPv6 and proxy mobile IPv6, and perform a quantitative simulation study where mobile IPv6 is used as a benchmark. The proposed protocol outperforms mobile IPv6 in terms of load on mobility anchors, video playout interruptions, and user-perceived quality.

Researchers and innovators in the field of wireless communications and implementers of mobility management functionality should find the article worthwhile reading.