Mobility support of QoS over IPv6 based fast handover for mobile WLANs

In this paper we analyze IPv6 handover over wireless LAN. Mobile IPv6 is designed to manage mobile station movement between wireless IPv6 networks. Nevertheless, the active communication of a mobile station is interrupted until the handover completes. Therefore, several extensions to mobile IPv6 have been proposed to reduce handover latency. We describe the fast handover protocol, which allows the use of layer 2 triggers to anticipate the handover, and presents two extensions, namely anticipated handover, and tunnel-based handover. Anticipated handover can be achieved by two techniques of anticipated handover re-routing: static virtual connection tree based re-routing (VCT) and dynamic virtual connection tree based re-routing (DVCT). The performance of the network during handover anticipation for both techniques of the protocol is analyzed in terms of their handover latency and bandwidth requirements. However, tunnel based handover, uses two methods: host-to-host tunnel and router-to-router tunnel. We compare the performance of both methods in terms of their important quality of service (QoS) parameters, such as throughput, latency and utilization. It is expected that the presented experience and results will be useful to optimize the parameters of QoS by using IPv6 networks