A framework for end-to-end differentiated services QoS context transfer in mobile IPv6

Future 4G mobile communication networks are expected to provide all IP-based services. Providing QoS guarantees and mobility support has become a hot research topic in the scenario. Differentiated Services (DiffServ/DS) is a promising QoS support approach due to its scalability. However, it faces a lot of challenges in mobile environments, such as no signaling mechanism to negotiate dynamically the Service Level Specification (SLS), traffic flow identification, etc. The COPS-SLS protocol is used as a signaling mechanism to achieve end-to-end inter-domain SLS dynamic negotiation and a framework for end-to-end DiffServ context transfer in Mobile IPv6 is proposed to overcome the weakness of context transfer protocol which can not meet the need of end-to-end QoS mechanisms because contexts are only transferred between ARs. Moreover, using the context transfer to re-establish DiffServ context can avoid re-initiating COPS-SLS signaling from scratch, and the end-to-end DiffServ context only transfers to the new added QBs along new path after the MN performs handover in this paper. Hence, our scheme can minimize the handover service disruption, and enable real-time session to promptly get the same forwarding process during the MN performs handover.