A New Reactive FMIPv6 Mechanism for Minimizing Packet Loss

Abstract

This paper considers a new reactive fast handover MIPv6 (FMIPv6) mechanism to minimize packet loss of the existing mechanism. The primary idea of the proposed reactive FMIPv6 mechanism is that the serving access router buffers packets toward the mobile node (MN) as soon as the link layer between MN and serving base station is disconnected. To implement the proposed mechanism, the router discovery message exchanged between MN and serving access router is extended. In addition, the IEEE 802.21 Media Independent Handover Function event service message is defined newly. Through analytic performance evaluation and experiments, the proposed reactive FMIPv6 mechanism can be shown to minimize packet loss much than the existing mechanism.