An enhanced fast handover with seamless mobility support for next-generation wireless networks

To allow mobile node be always connected regardless of its location on the Internet, mobile IPv6 (MIPv6) is designed for next-generation wireless networks. However, this protocol has some inherent drawbacks: long handoff delay and high packet loss; unbearable for many applications. To improve the performance, mobility protocols such as Fast handovers for MIPv6 (FMIPv6), Fast handover for Hierarchical MIPv6 (F-HMIPv6), Simplified Fast handover for MIPv6 networks (SFMIPv6), are proposed by researchers. But none of them can support seamless mobility. This paper proposes an enhanced fast handover protocol with seamless mobility supports, called enhanced Seamless MIPv6 (e-SMIPv6). Bidirectional tunnels are established among access routers before actual handover; accordingly mobile users can use their previous care-of address within a new visiting network. To reduce the delay related to duplicate address detection, each access router maintains a pool of duplicate-free addresses. To minimize packet loss, access router performs bicasting for roaming node. Our proposal can minimize mobility signaling as much as possible during handoff, which presents an ideal solution for fast moving and ping-pong moving mobile users. To analyze the performance, the city section mobility model is used. Of which numerical results show that e-SMIPv6 yields better performance than FMIPv6.