Scalable mobility and QoS support mechanism for IPv6-based real-time wireless Internet traffic

Advances in wireless broadband communications have continued steadily over the last few years. Both cellular operators and ISP, together with the relevant standardization bodies (e.g. 3GPP, IETF), are eagerly looking at the possibility of employing IP and its mobility and security extensions within their wireless networks. Mobile IPv6 is the most promising technology for developing such an all-IP mobile architecture. There are still several performance defects in this protocol for supporting QoS of real-time wireless traffic, however, because only simple route optimization methods and handoff mechanisms have been proposed. Therefore, innovative route optimization and handoff mechanisms that can handle the quality of service (QoS) of real-time wireless traffic must be developed. A scalable mobility and QoS support mechanism is proposed in this paper. This method optimizes the routing path between a corresponding node and a mobile node by checking the home address' binding cache entry prior to data transmission using RSVP signaling messages. Thus, prior bandwidth reservations at intermediate nodes along the optimal routing path can be achieved. This method also creates a Scalable and flexible routing path that can adapt its routing topology dynamically to account for both changing membership and changing routes. This routing path is constructed by using RSVP's resource reservation capability. Therefore, a fast and smooth handoff for the mobile node can be achieved, while guaranteeing the QoS of real-time traffic. Our proposed schemes are scalable and can be applied to future large-scale mobile IP networks.