Interaction of RSVP and Mobile IPv6 Protocols: An Evaluation of Performance on Wireless Networks

RSVP is considered the Integrated Services (IntServ) standard in providing QoS guarantees while Mobile IP is the standardized IETF proposal to facilitate terminal mobility in wireless IP networks. Since the former provides QoS guarantees and the later offers IP mobility, one would think that simply superimposing the two technologies would yield an optimum solution. This however is evidently not the case since RSVP was initially designed with static nodes in mind. This paper attempts to highlight the key issues involved with such an interaction by providing a testbed to quantitatively analyse how RSVP and MIPv6 hosts would likely to interact under different congestion scenarios. This paper also evaluates the potential effects and/or advantages of applying Mobile IPv6 enhancements such as Hierarchical Mobile IPv6 and Fast Handovers. As speculated, simply deploying default RSVP over MIPv6 does not yield an optimum result. More importantly, we show that in high congestion scenarios the IP-in-IP encapsulation introduced by HMIPv6 creates additional end-to-end packet delay and a slightly higher packet loss than MIPv6; thereby degrading the Mean Opinion Score (MOS). Based on our findings, MIPv6 with Fast Handovers (FMIPv6) operates best with RSVP due to minimal loss of packets during handoffs in addition to a smaller IP header when compared to HMIPv6. Finally we summarise the basic requirements needed to achieve an optimum QoS solution