Improving Mobile IPv6 Handover in Wireless Network with E-HCF

Mobile IP allows a mobile node to maintain a continuous connectivity to the Internet when moving from one access point to another. However, due to the link switching delay and to the Mobile IP handover operations, packets designated to mobile nodes can be delayed or lost during the handover period. This paper presents a new control function called Extended Handover Control Function (E-HCF) in order to improve the handover performance in the context of Mobile IPv6 over wireless networks. With an analytical model and some OPNET simulations, we show in this paper that our solution allows to provide low latency, low packet loss to the standard handover of Mobile IPv6.