Abstract
Next generation mobile networks aim to provide faster speed and more capacity along with energy efficiency to support video streaming andmassive data sharing in social and communication networks. In these networks, user equipment has to register with IPMultimedia Subsystem (IMS) which promises quality of service to the mobile users that frequently move across different access networks. After each handover caused due to mobility, IMS provides IPSec Security Association establishment and authentication phases. The main issue is that unnecessary reregistration after every handover results in latency and communication overhead. To tackle these issues, this paper presents a lightweight Fast IMS Mobility (FIM) registration scheme that avoids unnecessary conventional registration phases such as security associations, authentication, and authorization. FIM maintains a flag to avoid deregistration and sends a subsequent message to provide necessary parameters to IMS servers after mobility. It also handles the change of IP address for user equipment and transferring the security associations from old to new servers. We have validated the performance of FIM by developing a testbed consisting of IMS servers and user equipment. The experimental results demonstrate the performance supremacy of FIM. It reduces media disruption time, number of messages, and packet loss up to 67%, 100%, and 61%, respectively, as compared to preliminaries.