A Scheme to reduce the handoff latency using mSCTP in Fast Mobile IPv6

As improvement of wireless and mobile technologies, mobile devices such as laptops and PDAs are widely used. To support the mobility of such devices, mobile IPv6 (MIPv6) was proposed. In addition, fast mobile IPv6 (FMIPv6) and hierarchical mobile IPv6 (HMIPv6) was proposed for the seamless handoff. On the other hands, in transport layer, mobile stream control transport protocol (mSCTP) was proposed for the mobility support. The dynamic address resolution (DAR) signal in mSCTP provides an IP configuration to the Mobile Node (MN). With the DAR, the MN can change its IP address dynamically without connectionless. In the handoff procedure of FMIPv6, access routers (ARs) make the tunnel between them to reduce packet loss during link layer handoff. However, this scheme causes AR's packet forwarding process and buffering overhead. In addition, due to exchange some message to make the tunnel, a few handoff signaling costs and latencies are occurred in FMIPv6. Thus, in this paper, we propose the integrated handoff scheme using mSCTP in FMIPv6 to solve such problems. In the proposed scheme, the tunnel is not created anymore, because the MN uses the DAR signals to the handoff. Therefore, the proposed scheme removes tunneling overhead, a few signaling costs, and latencies. Moreover, the MN not executes a binding update (BU) procedure with the correspondent node (CN) after link layer handoff, because the MN registers a new IP address to CN in advance. The result of performance evaluation show that the proposed scheme reduces handoff latency about 54% and signaling cost about 45% compared to FMIPv6.