IPTV over WiMAX with MIPv6 Handovers

As the IPv4 unallocated address pool nears exhaustion, an increasing number of IPv6 deployments is anticipated. In the domain of mobility management research and development, mobile IPv6 has long been favored over mobile IPv4. Nevertheless, although in principle WiMax supports IPv6 in various configurations and requires MIPv6 for network-level mobility management, in practice, vendors are actively deploying these capabilities only in part. This paper provides a thorough review of the role of IPv6 and MIPv6 in WiMax networks, surveying the work in relevant standardization bodies. The second contribution of this paper is a testbed evaluation of IPTV streaming over WiMAX. We employ two WiMax testbeds deployed in Finland and Portugal, interconnected by GEANT and quantify MIPv6 performance in a real-time multimedia streaming scenario over WiMAX. Beyond demonstrating the feasibility of such a deployment, our results indicate that WiMAX can provide a viable option as both access and backhauling technology.