WiMAX handover improvement in IPv6-based next generation network

Having Internet and wireless networks continue their dramatic advances requires a lot to be provided such as seamless and soft handover procedure. However, seamless and fast handover mechanism is still one of the main research issues. When a mobile node performs macro movements, the changes in some access nodes, base stations and access routers are unavoidable. Upon such changes, MNs must re-register in servers or re-invite corresponding nodes and gain the necessary information again. These procedures need enough time to be done so the delay may cause the ongoing session to lose connectivity. In this paper, a novel scheme has been proposed for handover in IPv6-based WiMAX network. In this scheme we used context transfer mechanism to transmit important session information in different levels of network and also the handover messages are combined with the context transfer messages to reduce the total overhead. The performance of the proposed scheme has been evaluated by numerical analysis and simulation. The evaluation results show that the proposed method lead to lower handover disruption time and fewer messages passing overhead comparing to the current mode.