COST initiative 
"Traffic Engineering and QoS Control in Multimedia-enabled wireless networks" 

PLEASE fill in and return asap to 
COST initiative coordinator: 
e-mail: yk@cs.tut.fi 

COUNTRY: 
Belgium

Organization: 
University of Antwerp............................. 

Org-address 
Universiteitsplein 1, B-2610 Wilrijk - Belgium..................... 

Representative (in case of several representatives please repeat the below for each of them): 

Family-name, 
..............BLONDIA.................. 

Given-name, 
................Chris................................................. 

Degrees and positions 
.....Prof. Dr. ,  Professor,  Head of Department of Mathematics and Computer Science.......... 

tel.: 
..........+ 32 3 820 2404..................................................................... 

fax.: 
........+ 32 3 820 2421..................................................................... 

e-mail: 
...........chris.blondia@ua.ac.be............................................................... 

URL: 
............win-www.uia.ac.be/u/pats................................................................ 


Activity related to the proposed action:
Mobility Management in Multi-media enabled wireless networks 
Handoff in wireless networks forms a potential source of service degradation, in particular for mulit-media services, 
as it may lead to packets loss, throughput degradation and extra delay and delay variation. 
In order to allow mobility management in a heterogeneous network environment (IEEE 802.11, HIPERLAN, 
GPRS, 3G cellular,....), technology independent layer 3 mechanisms should be investigated. Mobile IP is 
the standard solution for layer 3 handoff. However, it may introduce considerable handoff latency and 
packet loss. Therefore, more optimised solutions need to be investigated, which allow a better 
support of QoS but still can be incorporated in the MIP protocols (see IETF activities within the Mobile IP working group). 
Although the aim is to propose layer 3 solutions, there might be some interaction with layer 2 
functions via triggers or other mechanisms. Furhtermore, other external information (such as location 
information using GPS) may be helpfull to obtain seamless mobility. 
The proposed protocols will be evaluated using analytical modeling techniques and simulation.