| This book aims at presenting, in a canonical form, the work done by us in the field of routing in mobile wireless networks. Most of the material contained herein has previously been presented at international conferences or has been accepted for publication in journals.
Mobile wireless networks can be broadly classified into two distinct categories: infrastructured (cellular) and infrastructureless (ad hoc). While cellular networks usually involve a single-hop wireless link to reach a mobile terminal, ad hoc networks normally require a multihop wireless path from a source to a destination. The growth of mobility aspects in cellular networks is occurring at three different levels. First, growth occurs at the spatial level (i.e., users desire to roam with a mobile terminal). Second, growth occurs from the penetration rate of mobile radio access lines. And third, the traffic generated by each wireless user is constantly growing. On one hand, tetherless (e.g., cellular) subscribers use their mobile terminals; on the other hand, the arrival of more capacity-greedy services (e.g., Internet accesses, multimedia services). From all of these considerations, the generalized mobility features will have serious impacts on the wireless telecommunications networks. Mobility can be categorized into two areas: radio mobility, which mainly consists of the handover process and network mobility, which mainly consists of location management (location updating and paging). In this book, we shall concentrate on the network mobility only.
This book will act as a general introduction to location management, and routing in both single-hop and multihop mobile wireless networks, so that readers can gain familiarity with location management and routing issues in this field. In particular, it will provide the details of location management and paging in wireless cellular networks, and routing in mobile ad hoc networks.
Wireless communication has recently captured the attention and the imagination of users from all walks of life. The major goal of wireless communication is now to allow a user to have access to the capabilities of global networks at any time without regard to location or mobility. Since their emergence in the 1970s [1], the mobile wireless networks have become increasingly popular in the networking industry. This has been particularly true within the past decade, which has seen wireless networks being adapted to enable mobility. Since the inception of cellular telephones in the early 1980s [2], they have evolved from a costly service with limited availability toward an affordable and more versatile alternative to wired telephony. In the future, it appears that, not only will cellular installations continue to proliferate, but wireless access to fixed telephones will become much more common. |
