UPMT: Universal Per-application Mobility management using Tunnels

In this paper we describe an application level Mobility Management mechanism for IP networks, called UPMT (Universal Per-Application Mobility management using Tunnels). The mechanism is able to provide Vertical Handovers over heterogeneous IP based access networks on a per-application basis, i.e. it is possible to independently route different applications over different access networks and take separate handover decisions for each application. UPMT is able to support legacy applications, does not require any support from the access networks nor any change to the TCP/IP stacks in the Mobile Hosts (MH), is able to run on NATed access networks that provide private IP addresses to MH and is fully transparent to Correspondent Hosts. UPMT relies on tunneling the IP packets from the MH to an Anchor Node on IP/UDP tunnels. UPMT provide the MH and the applications with a “virtual” NAT service across many different physical access network. The paper provide the specification of the tunneling architecture and of the mobility management signaling, based on SIP protocol. The Open Source implementation of UPMT for Linux OS is ongoing and its status is presented.