Enhanced Fast Handover Mechanism Using MIH Services in MIPv6

Abstract

In this paper, we propose an enhanced handover mechanism with new additional primitives and parameters to the media independent handover (MIH) services as defined in IEEE 802.21. The proposed scheme can reduce handover latency for MIPv6 (mobile IPv6) by removing the router discovery time. Moreover, when the proposed mechanism is applied to a FMIPv6 (fast handovers for MIPv6), we can increase the probability that FMIPv6 can be per-formed in a predictive mode by reducing the handover initiation time. As a result, we can get the reduced handover latency in FMIPv6. In addition, with the proposed scheme, we can design the cost-effective network by reducing cover-age overlap between adjacent cells. This is due to the decreased handover initiation time in FMIPv6. From simulation results, it is proven that the proposed scheme can provide a higher goodput for UDP and TCP because it has less service disruption during handovers. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2006.