Handoffs for real-time traffic in Mobile IP version 6 networks

Current commercial growth in wireless and mobile communications is being fueled by wireless Internet access and the promise of mobile multimedia applications. However, the delivery of such services depends on the ability of the mobile Internet to support real-time traffic flows with guaranteed quality of service (QoS). The current mobility protocol for the Internet, Mobile IP, was designed for best effort packet delivery, and, as a result of being based on IP version 4, has inefficient handoff routing procedures that limit its performance for real-time traffic. A new two-path handoff is proposed for Mobile IP networks that enables the Internet to support large-scale mobility while maintaining QoS guarantees for multimedia traffic. First, we discuss related work on Internet mobility. Then, we introduce the new two-path handoff technique, which incorporates IP version 6 and the integrated services (IntServ) QoS architecture. Finally, we compare the performance of our new technique with other proposed protocols for Mobile IP in terms of bandwidth use efficiency and handoff disruption times.