Summary
Existing mobile network architectures are flatter and employ a centralized mobility management (CMM) scheme, where the entire intelligence is focused on the single‐end, which leads to low scalability, lack of dynamic mobility support, suboptimal routing, and insufficiency to support large volumes of data. The fifth‐generation (5G) networks demand high‐speed seamless connections to the best‐connected network irrespective of user position and connectivity. Further, seamless handover has to be carried out between wireless local area network (WLAN), worldwide interoperability for microwave access (WiMAX), universal mobile telecommunication system (UMTS), and long‐term evolution (LTE). This paper aims to propose a distributed mobility management (DMM) solution in order to bring the mobility anchor point nearer to the mobile node (MN) to support the acceptable quality of service (QoS) and quality of experience (QoE) provision to end users. An information and decision server (IDS)‐based partial DMM scheme (IDS‐PDMM) is suggested to support optimized handover in internet protocol (IP)‐based heterogeneous architecture. The IDS estimates the nearest candidate network for MN during handover and thus provides a seamless connection for delay‐sensitive applications. The performance of the presented approach is compared with the existing CMM scheme and the simulation results prove that the IDS‐PDMM efficiently minimizes the handover delay and packet loss rate with guaranteed QoS provision.