Advance duplicate address detection (DAD) and buffering-based provision of seamless handover in mobile IPV6

Due to the concerns about the imminent crunch in available addresses in the previous version of Internet Protocol, IPv4, and to offer additional functionalities for new devices, IPv6 was proposed. Mobile IPv6 (MIPv6), an extension to IPv6, manages Mobile Nodes’ movements between wireless IPv6 networks. One of the most important considerations for Mobile IPv6 is handover management. It is desired that handover be fast and lossless. Seamless handovers are such that they incur minimum packet loss and delay. Various proposals have been made for seamless handover in MIPv6. By forwarding the packets destined to the Mobile Node towards the new point of attachment and storing the packets there until the Mobile Node has attached there, packet loss can be significantly decreased, and the delay associated with the forwarding is also less compared to forwarding from the previous point. In this paper, we study the performance of one such scheme which has optimized fast handover over hierarchical structure with buffering and simulation using NS-2 to evaluate packet loss and delay for UDP streams. It was observed that with the buffering scheme used, the handover was seamless. There was a difference in latencies with and without handover, as expected. It was observed that most of the performance factors studied depended on the data rate of the traffic. The factors were found to be more dependent on the data rate than on the speed of the Mobile Node.