A Handover Scheme Supporting IPv4-IPv6 Traversal over Network-based Mobility Management Domains

As IPv6 being more widely deployed, dual stack mobile nodes will move into IPv6 or IPv4 only network. In this environment, maintaining IP connectivity during handover is not possible. Conventional IP mobility management protocols, such as MIP (mobile IP) can not support mobile node's handover between IP networks with different IP versions. In order to address this problem, IETF MIP6 WG proposed MIPv6 based solution. However, in the MIPv6 based solution, mobile nodes need to have mobility management stack and require host software update. Also, mobile nodes participate in mobility management process. The NetLMM (network-based localized mobility management) is expected to be one of the prominent ways to support IP mobility to mobile nodes, because it overcomes the disadvantages of MIPv6. This paper addresses the handover problem of dual stack mobile nodes when the mobile nodes roam over IPv4 and IPv6 NetLMM domains. We extend the conventional NetLMM scheme to support IPv4-IPv6 traversal between NetLMM domains that have different IP versions. The proposed handover management scheme enables the exchange of mobile node's binding update message between NetLMM domains.