Design and implementation of ARIP for efficient handovers

Abstract

Mobile IPv6 (MIPv6), which is a protocol being standardized by Internet Engineering Task Force for global IP mobility support, is expected to have a key role for future All-IP wireless networks. As the demands for delay sensitive multimedia applications increase, the handover latency and packet losses of MIPv6 become inadequate for these applications. Fast Handovers for Mobile IPv6 (FMIPv6) has been proposed to tackle the problem. However, FMIPv6 cannot work solely since it needs access router information for its fast handover operation. In this paper, we propose Access Router Information Protocol (ARIP), which performs a candidate access router discovery and a radio access network discovery in one protocol suite, to provide an efficient handover framework for MIPv6 and FMIPv6. ARIP is designed to cope with heterogeneous networks as well as homogeneous networks and to be closely coupled with FMIPv6 to provide the efficient handover performance. The performance evaluation of MIPv6, FMIPv6, and FMIPv6 with ARIP is performed in an actual network environment. The performance results show that FMIPv6 with ARIP can significantly improve the handover performance compared to the conventional handover approaches. Copyright (C) 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.