Evaluation of end-to-end QoS support for mobile hosts in IPv6 with IEEE802.11e

This paper proposes and evaluates a simple, yet effective, end-to-end QoS architecture for mobile hosts that combines IntServ/DiffServ and MIPv6 with IEEE802.11e. IntServ and DiffServ are two architectures developed by the IETF to support Internet QoS. Designed for wired non-mobile networks, IntServ provides per-flow QoS and is deemed to be only suitable for edge networks while DiffServ provides aggregate QoS and is suitable for use in core networks. For mobile hosts, IPv6 has built-in capability to support IP level mobility, which we refer to as mobile IPv6 (MIPv6), and IEEE802.11e provides QoS support at the MAC layer of IEEE802.11-based WLANs. In this paper, we use IntServ at edge networks, DiffServ at core networks, and IEEE802.11e at the wireless last hop to provide end-to-end QoS for mobile hosts. Moreover, it is found that the loss of router advertisement (RAD) messages of MIPv6 adversely affects the handoff performance. Therefore, minimizing or totally eliminating the loss of RADs is a key aspect of our approach. We achieve this by assigning RADs a higher priority and compare the handoff performance with the case of no priority for RADs.