The purpose of this Recommendation is to describe a generic framework of mobility management (MM) for next generation networks (NGNs), which will include:

• Design issues common to both location management and handover control;

• Functional architecture for mobility management in the NGN perspective;

• High-level information flows for mobility management.

It is noted that there are a variety of mobility types such as terminal mobility, network mobility, services mobility, etc. This Recommendation focuses on the terminal mobility in the IP or higher layer among those MM types. MM schemes associated with a specific link-layer or lower-layer technology might be applied to the functions described in this Recommendation. However, the access-technology specific details are outside the scope of this Recommendation.

This Recommendation describes a two-level architecture for MM functionality. For a scalability enhancement of MM in the NGN, the functional architecture can be extended to the architecture with more than two levels. This Recommendation also describes a high-level relationship between the MM control functions and the other functions defined in the NGN-FRA Release 1 so as to provide a guideline for further work on adding MM control functions to the NGN-FRA architecture.