Handover control function based handover for mobile IPv6

Abstract

IEEE 802.11 Wireless LAN (WLAN) has been enthusiastically adopted in business offices, homes, and other spaces, for both public and private wireless local network connection. The users would like to deploy Voice IP (VoIP) and Video Phone based on Mobile IPv6 Protocol over Wireless LAN network. However, the frequent change in the mobile node's location causes evident signaling overhead, handover latency and packet loss, which in turn leads to the service degradation of real time traffic in Mobile IPv6. In this paper, we propose a scheme based on Wireless LAN by adding a new component called Handover Control Function (HCF) in MIPv6, which records all APs's MAC address, backend ARs' address and network prefix of those AP's. By the means that all Mobile Nodes (MNs) report periodically all AP's MAC address and signal strength information to HCF which MN can probe, HCF decides whether or which AP MN shall associate with and notifies MN about the new AP/AR's information, meanwhile, a bi-cast mechanism shall be applied to further improve handover performance by reducing the packet loss during handover. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2006.