Optimization of vertical handover decision procedure using an experimental MIPv6 testbed

The paper presents an experimental geographical testbed used to analyze the handover performance of the mobile IPv6 (MIPv6) protocol. The analysis carried out using a current implementation of MlPv6 protocol has allowed us to identify that a relevant contribution to handover latency can be associated to the handover decision. In the standard implementation, this procedure is triggered by the layer 3 neighbor unreachability detection algorithm. To overcome this problem, we have developed and tested a kernel module devoted to the dynamic management of the network interfaces of a mobile node. The developed interface management module (IMM) works in cooperation with the mobile IPv6 implementation, extending Its functionalities to better support interface selection and movement detection. The experimental performance analysis highlights the ability of the proposed IMM to reduce the vertical handover decision time