QoS-based fast handover scheme for improving service continuity in MIPv6

Owing to fast technology developments of wireless communication and mobile computing, the integration of UMTS, WLAN, WiMAX and Mobile IPv6 (MIPv6) is one of the most important issues. While mobile nodes move between wireless networks, it will increase the possibility of service interruptions and radio link disconnections under different mobile networks. Most of the MIPv6 protocols are to extend Quality of Service (QoS) object option for setting up QoS negotiation and Service Level Agreement (SLA). The MIH is designed to handle the hard handover problems which cause service interruption among network, transport, and application layers on the heterogeneous networks. Based on Quality Decision Engine (QDE), this paper proposed IQDE (Improved QDE) to mitigate service interruption and improve the performance via following new features: (1) Adding IEEE 802.21 MIH parameters; (2) Adopting IQDE to shorten the QoS path reestablishment time for improving service continuity problems on the MIPv6. Our simulation results indicate that PFMIPv6 with IQDE can provide stable Packet Transfer Delay (PTD), obtain higher Throughput (TH), and lower Packet Delay Variance (i.e., Jitter) than other two handover protocols, FMIPv6 and PFMIPv6.