Performance Enhancement of Fast Handover for MIPv6 by Reducing Out-of-Sequence Packets

Abstract

FMIPv6 can reduce packet loss using a tunnel-based handover mechanism which relies on L2 triggers, such as transmitting a packet from a previous access router (PAR) to a new access router (NAR). However, this mechanism may result in decreasing the performance of TCP due to out-of-sequence packets arriving between the tunneled packets from the Home Agent and PAR, and the directly transmitted packets from the correspondent node (CN). In this paper, we propose a new scheme called EF-MIPv6 that uses a modified snoop protocol to prevent the packet reordering problem. This new scheme can prevent sequence reordering of data packets and improve the performance of TCP using enhanced fast binding update (EF-BU). This approach requires modification of the TCP header to execute the last packet expression from the PAR, include a new polling data packet, and use the modified access point system. Simulation results demonstrate that managing the packet sequence in our proposed scheme greatly increases the overall TCP performance in a Mobile IPv6 and FMIPv6 networks.