Adaptive handoff management in the proxy mobile IPv6 domain

Abstract

To improve handoff performance of the network-based Proxy Mobile IPv6 (PMIPv6), two types of enhanced handoff schemes have been presented; fast handover for PMIPv6 (F-PMIPv6) and route optimization handover (ROH). The F-PMIPv6 is committed to reduce handoff latency and is efficient to perform handoff signaling. However, it causes high packet delivery cost from additional tunneling at the LMA. The ROH minimizes packet delivery cost by allowing direct route of MAG-to- MAG but introduces high handoff signaling cost. Due to the tradeoff between handoff signaling and packet delivery cost, both schemes cannot guarantee a better performance for a diverse mobile environment where a mobile node (MN) has a different session arrival and mobility rate. Thus, we propose an adaptive PMIPv6 handoff (APHO) scheme to reduce the overall data overhead and improve the throughput over a wide range of session-to-mobility ratio (SMR). The APHO consists of mobility-aware APHO (M-APHO) and session-aware S-APHO (S-APHO), which are determined by comparing the SMR and pre-defined threshold. By analyzing the performance of FHO, ROH, and APHO, we confirm that the APHO has a better performance than the other schemes over a wide range of SMR. © 2011 IEEE.