The Impacts of Signaling Time on the Performance of Fast Handovers for MIPv6

A Fast Handover protocol (FMIPv6) in IETF working group is proposed to reduce the handover latency in Mobile IPv6 standard protocol. The FMIPv6 proposes some procedures for fast movement detection and fast binding update to minimize the handover latency. Additionally, to reduce the lost packets caused by a handover, this protocol introduces buffers in access routers. However, the handover latency or the amount of lost packets are affected by the time to send signals such as Fast Binding Update message for the fast handover. In this paper, we inspect the impacts of the signaling time on packet loss and handover latency in FMIPv6 through the numerical analysis, we propose the optimal signaling time to improve the performance of FMIPv6 in terms of the handover latency and lost packets.