P2P-based mobility management protocol for global seamless handover in heterogeneous wireless networks

In this article, we propose a P2P-based mobility management protocol for global seamless handover in heterogeneous wireless networks. Unlike previous mobility management protocols such as IETF MIPv4/6 and its variants, the proposed protocol can support global seamless handover without changing the existing network infrastructure. The idea of the proposed protocol is that the location management function for mobility management is separately supported from packet forwarding function, and bidirectional IP tunnels for packet transmission are dynamically constructed between two end-to-end mobile hosts. In addition, early handover techniques have been developed to avoid large handover delays and packet losses using the IEEE 802.21 Media Independent Handover functions. The architecture and signaling procedure of the proposed protocol have been designed in detail, and the mathematical analysis and simulation have been done for performance evaluation. The performance results show that the proposed protocol outperforms the existing MIPv6 and HMIPv6 in terms of handover latency and packet loss.