QoS Assessment on Mobile IPv6

Since IPv6 is designed for fixed hosts, the extension of IPv6 to mobile IPv6 is necessary for management in mobile and wireless environment. In this paper, we present an assessment of current mobile IPv6 performance by the means of the network simulator ns-2 and its extension MOBIWAN. Three different tests have been carried out with different traffic types on different network topologies. We investigate several parameters regarding to QoS such as: packet loss, delay, jitter, handover latency and signaling load to see how they are impacted by the routing strategies, by the medium properties, by the complexity of the topology, and by the behavior of mobile user. Our simulation results show that: i) the use of route optimization prevents the congestion at the home agent and home link of mobile node but higher bandwidth may be required. Furthermore, the improvement of network performance could be significant for only some specific circumstances; ii) when the wired link delay is increased, the binding update latency is also higher which leads to more packet losses during the handover process; iii) in the route optimization mode, the maximum jitter measured from all tests is about 12 ms on average, which is acceptable; iv) with our tested configurations, the binding update latency for the VoIP traffic is about 300 ms which is quite high but still lower than the allowed bound.