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Flexible and Distributed Mobility Management for Integrated Terrestrial-Satellite Networks: Challenges, Architectures, and Approaches | IEEE Journals & Magazine | IEEE Xplore

Flexible and Distributed Mobility Management for Integrated Terrestrial-Satellite Networks: Challenges, Architectures, and Approaches


Abstract:

Integrated terrestrial-satellite networks (lTSNs) are envisioned to provide seamless broadband services through evolving terrestrial B5G/6G cellular systems and emerging ...Show More

Abstract:

Integrated terrestrial-satellite networks (lTSNs) are envisioned to provide seamless broadband services through evolving terrestrial B5G/6G cellular systems and emerging mega satellite constellations. The inherent dual mobility (i.e., satellites and ubiquitous mobile users) and highly overlapped satellite footprints in such ITSNs may result in massive and frequent handovers. This increases handover delays, signaling overheads, and decision making loads, especially under existing fixed, even limited, deployments of ground mobility management functions (MMFs). Thus, a lightweight handover scheme and a mobility management architecture with dynamic MMF configurations are of great significance to guarantee service continuity and management timeliness. Specifically, this article proposes mobility management architectures with an augmented reconfigurable management plane on a higher orbit. The architectures can support flexible configurations of space-distributed MMFs for efficient mobility management together with the ground MMFs. Subsequently, to achieve rapid and unified decisions for massive handovers, we design a clustering and game-based handover decision framework including centralized and distributed decision making functions for different conditions. Based on handover procedures, simulation results validate the high performance of the proposed schemes regarding handover delays, signaling overheads, and convergence property. Notably, many academic issues are worthy of further studies under this architecture, such as higher-layer constellation design and inter-layer management structure optimization.
Published in: IEEE Network ( Volume: 35, Issue: 4, July/August 2021)
Page(s): 73 - 81
Date of Publication: 20 August 2021

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