Flow-based forwarding scheme and performance analysis in mobile IPv6 networks

The rising number of mobile users, the advent of various radio access technologies, and the increasing importance of IP services over wireless as well as wired networks pose a number of new design and deployment challenges. While mobile IP has been designed for mobility management in IP networks, it still has a high latency and signaling overhead during handoff. Some proposals for seamless handover support have been published and some analytic work on their performance done. However, there are still many issues in multimedia and real-time service provisioning over mobile IP networks. One of the main reasons is that the current IP network is best effort based and cannot provide QoS guarantee for real-time services. In this paper, we propose a flow-based routing scheme in mobile IPv6 networks to support real-time traffic by using the flow label field in IPv6 packets. The proposed scheme takes the advantages of rapid establishment of a flow and fast forward of packets based on flow state information that lowers the packet processing time and transmission delay; the hierarchical network structure that reduces signaling loads, and a fast flow handoff algorithm that ensures minimal handover latencies and packet losses.