Comparison of RA Beaconing Techniques in Mobile IPv6

The address auto-configuration of MIPv6 mobile nodes relies on the availability of a router advertisement (RA) messages from the access router responsible of the subnet, which the terminal is moving towards. If the mobile node does not receive an RA message by a certain period, it sends a router solicitation (RS) message to request router information. This phase is critical during handoff procedures. In this paper, we present an original approach to diminish bandwidth occupation of beaconing messages while preserving the handoff delay due to reception of an advertisement to be under acceptable values. For instance, the technique is based on variable length bursts of RA messages, centered at the predicted instants of handoff arrivals, estimated by means of the classical least mean square error (LMSE) method. Simulations confirm that even with a second-order prediction filter, the beaconing of RA messages can decrease by about 30% the bandwidth occupation with respect to other schemes based on constant rate of RA messages, while maintaining the handoff setup time below the 30ms. In the conclusions, we give directions of further improvements for cases not considered in the present work