Seamless Mobility Management in IP-based Wireless/Mobile Networks with Fast Handover

Abstract

The challenges of rapidly growing numbers of mobile nodes in IPv6-based networks are being faced by mobile computing researchers worldwide. Recently, IETF has standardized Mobile IPv6 and Fast Handover for Mobile IPv6 (FMIPv6) for supporting IPv6 mobility. Even though existing literatures have asserted that FMIPv6 generally improves MIPv6 in terms of handover speed, they did not carefully consider the details of the whole handover procedures. Therefore, in conventional protocols, the handover process reveals numerous problems manifested by a time-consuming network layer based movement detection and latency in configuring a new care of address with confirmation. In this article, we study the impact of the address configuration and confirmation procedure on the IP handover latency. To mitigate such effects, we propose a new scheme which can reduce the latency taken by the movement detection, address configuration and confirmation from the whole handover latency. Furthermore, a mathematical analysis is provided to show the benefits of our scheme. In the analysis, various parameters are used to compare our scheme with the current procedures, while our approach is focused on the reduction of handover latency. Finally, we demonstrate total handover scenarios for the proposed techniques and discussed the major factors which contribute to the handover latency.