An Efficient Macro Mobility Scheme Supporting Reactive Fast Handover Mode in HMIPv6

Abstract

Mobile IPv6 (MIPv6) is protocol to support mobility with no restriction of a mobile node (MN)’s geographical location in the network. However, MIPv6 has weak points, such as handover latency resulting from movement detections, IP address configurations and location updates which is unacceptable in real-time application. To make up for it, IETF considers fast mobile IPv6 (FMIPv6) and hierarchical mobile IPv6 (HMIPv6). FMIPv6 aims to reduce handover latency and data loss. HMIPv6 aims to manage the MN’s mobility and reduce handover latency. Since the FMIPv6 and HMIPv6 provide the fast micro mobility scheme when the MN moves between access routers within same mobility anchor point (MAP), they are not appropriate for the macro mobility when the MN moves between the MAPs. Besides, the macro mobility using these schemes will not provide mobile devices with seamless service, which causes packet losses. To make up for it, the efficient macro mobility scheme supporting fast handover has been proposed However, if the MN does not receive a fast binding acknowledgement (FBACK) message before L3 handover, the packets destined to the MN are lost during L3 handover. In this paper, we propose an efficient macro mobility supporting reactive fast handover mode to reduce packet loss when the MN does not receive the FBACK message before L3 handover. We adopt the fast handover method from FMIPv6 (fast MIPv6) for proposed scheme.

This work was supported by the Korea Research Foundation Grant funded by the Korean Government (MOEHRD) (KRF-2006-005-J03802).