Operational Experiment of Seamless Handover of a Mobile Router using Multiple Care-of Address Registration

NEMO Basic Support (NEMO BS) adds a mobility function to IPv6 routers, such a router is called as a mobile router. The network behind the mobile router (mobile network) becomes logically static. This function is considered useful when a network has a lot of nodes that do not have a mobility function but move with the network. The typical usage of this technology is the network provided in a transportation system like a bus or airplane. In the base specification of NEMO BS, a mobile router can use one IPv6 address as its attachment point at one time. Therefore, the mobile router and its mobile network will face service disruption of network connectivity while the mobile router is moving from one network to other network. In this paper, we explain two operational experiments of network mobility. One is an experiment using only the base NEMO BS function. The other is an experiment of seamless handover using multiple network interfaces to solve the problem. In these experiments, the mobile networks were actual conference networks which held a few hundred people. The result shows that the multiple interfaces usage provides one-third to one-tenth of the packet loss rate compared to the case that is not using the technology. Also most attendees of the conference did not notice the movement, which means the technology can be used for the realistic solution for the seamless handover.