A Network-based Handover Scheme for Hierarchical Mobile IPv6 over IEEE 802.16e

Mobile IPv6 (MIPv6), which is proposed by IETF(Internet Engineering Task Force), will be a main mobility management protocol in the future IP-based wireless and mobile networks. But MIPv6 has a long handover delay relative to a link layer handover delay. As handover latency increases, mobile nodes (MN) experience performance degradation. It significantly impacts on the performance of real-time applications. Various protocols that are based on MIPv6 are proposed by IETF to reduce the handover latency. In particular, hierarchical MIPv6 (HMIPv6) is designed to reduce the handover latency by introducing micro and macro mobility management. In HMIPv6, binding update costs can be lessened when handover occurs in the intra domain area. In this paper, we propose the network-based handover scheme based on HMIPv6 that uses indication from link layer. Handover latency and packet losses during intra domain handover are significantly reduced compared to HMIPv6 by using the proposed scheme. We evaluate the proposed mechanism by simulating it over IEEE 802.16e in ns-2. The simulation results quantitatively show that the proposed scheme outperforms HMIPv6 in terms of handover latency and packet losses.