Performance analysis of fast handover for proxy Mobile IPv6

In Proxy Mobile IPv6 (PMIPv6), any involvement by the Mobile Node (MN) is not required, so that any tunneling overhead can be removed from over-the-air. However, during the PMIPv6 handover process, there still exists a period when the MN is unable to send or receive packets because of PMIPv6 protocol operations, suffering from handover latency and data loss. Thus, to reduce the handover latency and data loss in PMIPv6, Fast Handover for PMIPv6 (PFMIPv6) is being standardized in the IETF. Nevertheless, PFMIPv6 has a few weaknesses: (1) handover initiation can be false, resulting in the PFMIPv6 handover process done so far becoming unnecessary. (2) Extra signaling is introduced in setting up an IP-in-IP tunnel between the serving and the new Mobile Access Gateways (MAGs). Therefore, in this paper, we present our study on the protocol overhead and performance aspects of PFMIPv6 in comparison with PMIPv6. We quantify the signaling overhead and the enhanced handover latency and data loss by conducting a thorough analysis of the performance aspects. The analysis is very meaningful to obtain important insights on how PFMIPv6 improves the handover performance over PMIPv6, especially in a highway vehicular traffic scenario where Base Stations (BSs)/Access Points (APs) can be placed in one dimensional space and MN’s movements are quasi one-dimensional, so that the degree of certainty for an anticipated handover is increased. Further, our analytical study is verified by simulation results.