Mobile node extension employing buffering function to improve handoff performance

In the near future, a mobility management protocol (MMP) that provides network layer mobility over all access technologies will be required. Mobile IPv6 (MIP) and Hierarchical Mobile IPv6 (HMIP) are candidates for MMP; however the communication quality level of these candidates is severely degraded during handoff. As a result, over the past several years, many advanced MMPs have been proposed to improve handoff performance. Most of these require some modifications to the access routers (ARs) and some specifications on the access technologies though it will be difficult to manage all ARs and their wireless links in the future mobile Internet. Therefore, as another way to improve the handoff performance of MIP and HMIP, we propose a mobile node (MN) extension employing a buffering function. Computer simulation results show that the proposed MN improves handoff performance over UDP and TCP communications.