Abstract
Flow mobility is an emerging technology to support flexible network selection for an application flow and to spread concentrated load to less-overloaded Internet access. Network-based flow mobility (FMO) does not require a massive amount of software logic and system resources on the mobile node. Under this approach, there are two kinds of modes available: network-initiated and user-initiated. Network-initiated FMO decides the best access network suited for a specific flow, but the decisions depend on the operator's policy. Therefore, it has limitations in supporting the user's preference and private network selection. In the user-initiated mode, users can hand off specific flow so that information of both the current user's preference and the conditions of private network are reflected. User-initiated flow mobility method has not been what should be specified and how it can be supported with the protocol sequence for real deployment. This paper extends Internet Exchange Key v2 (IKEv2) and an Attach request message to support user-initiated FMO when a flow moves between 3G and Wi-Fi access. Through performance analysis, we confirm that user-initiated FMO is superior to network-initiated FMO in terms of signaling overhead and handover latency costs.
