Improved fast handovers for mobile IPv6 over IEEE 802.16e network

Abstract

The purpose of Fast Handovers for Mobile IPv6(FMIPv6) is to reduce the overall handover latency resulting from standard Mobile IPv6(MIPv6) procedures. The standard FMIPv6 procedure comprises layer 2 and layer 3 handover procedures, and these are performed serially. This causes a long latency problem which is not negligible for real-time service such as Voice over IP(VoIP) over IEEE 802.16e network. We revise FMIPv6 messages to reduce the overall latency on handover over IEEE 802.16e networks. A Layer 2 handover message gives layer 3 handover messages a piggyback, and so the mobile node(MN) which is operated by our scheme, is able to finish overall handover earlier than standard MIPv6 and FMIPv6. We evaluate the performance of the scheme by analyzing the overall cost. Compared to FMIPv6 handover scheme, the proposed scheme gains about 27% of improvement. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2007.