Target access router selection in advanced mobility scenarios

To provide nomadic users with QoS-enabled services, advanced mobility management will prove to be of fundamental importance in the future Internet. Mobile IP is the reference protocol supporting mobility at IP level. However, it has been widely recognised that it could perform poorly, especially with QoS demanding applications. In order to improve Mobile IP performance, the discovery and selection of the target access router to hand over to will play a crucial role. In this paper, we present a novel approach for Candidate Access Router Discovery and Target Access Router selection. The process is fully distributed, multicast-based, and allows timely intra and inter-access router handover, which can be either intra or inter-technology. The effectiveness of the solution to drive mobile terminal handovers has been tested by simulations.