An enhanced fast handover mechanism based on cross over router discovery in mobile IPv6 networks

Abstract

Next-generation wireless/mobile networks are expected to provide a substantially wider and enhanced range of services. Global convergence, interoperability, and mobility are some of the differentiating factors from current networks. Moreover, the inherent IP support will encourage new personalized interactive multimedia services, as well as new broadband applications, such as video telephony, videoconferencing, and mobile Internet. Hence, mobility support is one of the most critical issues in All IP-based wireless/mobile networks. IETF has proposed Mobile IPv6 (MIPv6) as a de facto mobility protocol in IPv6 networks. To reduce handover latency and packet loss in Mobile IPv6 networks when Mobile Nodes (MNs) perform handoffs, Fast Mobile IPv6 (FMIPv6) was proposed. Although FMIPv6 can be a promising approach to support for seamless handover in IP domain, there are still a number of challenging issues related to FMIPv6 networks, especially in support for real-time services . This thesis presents an enhanced fast handover scheme, namely Cross over Router based Fast Handover for Mobile IPv6 (X-FMIPv6). We propose Proactive Cross over Router Discovery scheme that allows to locate Cross over Router in advance, before MN actually makes handover to a new subnet. Based on that, we improve the FMIPv6 with an enhanced fast handover scheme in which a bi-directional tunnel established between the Cross over Router and the new Access Router (NAR) to achieve the optimum packet routing during handoff time. The performance analysis and simulation of the proposed scheme are performed and the results show that the proposal give better performance compared with basic FMIPv6 in term of handover latency, transmission delay and number of out-of-order packets and outperforms standard MIPv6.