Performance evaluation of the flow-based fast handover method for Mobile IPv6 network

When a mobile node changes its point of attachment in the network, it experiences a time when it cannot receive or send any packets. This time, called handover delay, might also cause packet loss, resulting in undesired quality-of-service degradation for various types of applications. This issue remains a problem, although "Mobility Support in IPv6" has just reached IETF (Internet Engineering Task Force) RFC status. Earlier, we proposed a fast handover method called flow-based fast handover for Mobile IPv6 (FFHMIPv6) to speed up the L3 handover process. FFHMIPv6 employs flow-based information and IPv6-in-IPv6 tunneling for the fast redirection of flows during MIPv6 handover. The paper compares the performance of the FFHMIPv6 method to other fundamental handover methods with Network Simulator 2 (ns-2). Both UDP and TCP based applications are studied.