An Efficient Handoff Mechanism with Reduced Latency in Hierarchical Mobile IPv6

Abstract

As handoff latency increases, mobile hosts experience performance and service quality degradations. Typically, it gives a significant impact on the performance of real-time multimedia applications. In this paper, an efficient handoff mechanism that reduces the handoff latency in HMIPv6 is proposed. In the proposed handoff mechanism, each access router learns its neighboring access router information. For this, a neighbor access router discovery scheme is proposed. When a mobile host senses that it will perform a handoff to a new network, it performs an Address Auto-configuration procedure for its LCoA (RCoA and LCoA in case of the handoff to a new MAP domain) in advance using the neighbor access router information received from the current access router. These features give us the reduction of latency both in intra-MAP and inter-MAP handoffs. The simulation results using ns-2 show that the proposed handoff mechanism reduces handoff latency.