A scheme for reducing handover and packet loss in heterogeneous mobile IPv6 networks

Handover in future wireless communication systems must be seamless. However, current IP-level mobility protocols have difficulties meeting the stringent handover delay requirements. At the same time they do not give sufficient control to the network to optimize the handover process and they do not deal well with slow connection setups of some wireless technologies. In this paper, we propose an enhanced handover scheme in a heterogeneous mobile environment with the support of the Media Independent Handover (MIH) Services and Advance Duplicate Address Detection (A-DAD). The proposed scheme can reduce the handover latency in Mobile IPv6 greatly. We perform a simulation on handover between WiMAX and WLAN IEEE 802.11b with the proposed scheme in Mobile IPv6. The results show that the proposed scheme can get better handover performance in terms of handover latency.