Measuring the Performance of Fast Handovers in Mobile IPv6 Networks

Measuring the performance of an implementation is important for wide deployment of the fast handovers for MIPv6 (FMIPv6) protocol, which has been proposed to eliminate service interruptions for host mobility or network mobility. In this paper, we implement the FMIPv6 protocol in a real test-bed environment and study its performance in terms of handover latency and packet loss. Link layer triggers are implemented to aid fast handovers, and a buffering mechanism on the access routers is utilized to reduce the packet loss in predictive fast handovers. Experimental results show that the performance of FMIPv6 can achieve significant improvements with link layer triggers. Compared with reactive fast handovers, predictive fast handovers can produce lower packet loss with the buffering mechanism, but may yield larger handover latency for the uncertainty of the anticipation time.