A Fast Handover Protocol for Mobile IPv6 Using Mobility Prediction Mechanism

Mobile IPv6 enables mobile node to roam transparently in any network. It shows good performance for macro mobility but it is not proper for supporting micro mobility because of large latency. Accordingly, IETF (Internet Engineering Task Force) mobileip WG(Working Group) suggests Fast Handover Protocol and HMIPv6(Hierarchical Mobile IPv6) for micro mobility management. However, HMIPv6 has some problems of scalability if the mobility anchor point handles too many mobile nodes, and fast handover protocol has problem that mobile node can not send an L3 packet once it has started an L2 handover. So existing protocols currently do not support a suitable handover mechanism to allow a fast moving mobile node to change its point of attachment from one network to another. In this paper, we propose a fast handover mechanism to use mobility prediction table over wireless LAN for fast moving mobile node. We evaluated packet loss in our proposed mechanism using mobility prediction with various fast handover schemes. Simulation results show effectiveness of our scheme.