Performance evaluation of improved fast PMIPv6-based network mobility for intelligent transportation systems

The network mobility basic support (NEMO BS) protocol has been investigated to provide Internet connectivity for a group of nodes, which is suitable for intelligent transportation systems (ITS) applications. NEMO BS often increases the traffic load and handover latency because it is designed on the basis of mobile Internet protocol version 6 (MIPv6). Therefore, schemes combining proxy MIPv6 with NEMO (P-NEMO) have emerged to solve these problems. However, these schemes still suffer from packet loss and long handover latency during handover. Fast P-NEMO (FP-NEMO) has emerged to prevent these problems. Although the FP-NEMO accelerates handover, it can cause a serious tunneling burden between the mobile access gateways (MAGs) during handover. This problem becomes more critical as the traffic between the MAGs increases. Therefore, we propose a scheme for designing an improved FP-NEMO (IFP-NEMO) to eliminate the tunneling burden by registering a new address in advance. When the registration is completed before the layer 2 handover, the packets are forwarded to the new MAG directly and thereby the IFP-NEMO avoids the use of the tunnel between the MAGs during handover. For the evaluation of the performance of the IFP-NEMO compared with the FP-NEMO, we develop an analytical framework for fast handovers on the basis of P-NEMO. Finally, we demonstrate that the IFP-NEMO outperforms the FP-NEMO through numerical results.