Low-Latency Non-predictive Handover Scheme in Mobile IPv6 Environments

In IP-based wireless/mobile networks, minimizing handover latency is one of the most important issues. Fast handover mobile IPv6 (FMIPv6) reduces the handover latency by handover prediction with link-layer information. It requires additional overhead in terms of signaling and may waste resources by incorrect prediction. In this paper, we introduce a new non-predictive handover scheme which employs a handover agent to speedup handover. Signaling and packet delivery costs associated with handover are introduced to compare the performance of the proposed scheme with FMIPv6 and MIPv6. As a result, we found that the proposed scheme guarantees lower handover latency as well as fewer signaling messages than FMIPv6 regardless of prediction accuracy.