Seamless Handover Using FMIPv6 with Effective Tunnel Management Scheme

Fast Mobile IPv6 has been proposed to reduce latency and packet loss inherent to the handover process. However the previous research did not consider the packet loss according to the tunnel management for Fast Mobile IPv6. In the procedure of binding updates and fast binding updates, a mobile node has to establish new tunnels after receiving binding acknowledgement messages. While completing the tunnel creation and routing update, the mobile node can not handle packets incoming and outgoing through the new tunnels. This drawback causes packet loss of impeding the seamless handover. To reduce this packet loss, we have developed an effective tunnel management scheme called Dual Mode Tunneling (DMT). It employs decapsulation-only tunnels before using typical tunnels which can do an encapsulation and decapsulation. Through implementation and experimental study for vertical handover between 3G long term evolution and wireless local area network, we have evaluated the performance of the proposed scheme.