An experimental performance evaluation of the IETF FMIPv6 protocol over IEEE 802.11 WLANs

Straightforward, transparent mobility management has now been available for some time with IPv6 through the mobile IPv6 protocol. There are numerous MIPv6 implementations available and some have been successfully deployed and tested in real world scenarios. Yet, certain aspects of that mobility support, such as security, seamless handovers, and heterogeneous network technologies support are still being discussed and improved by working groups on the IETF and in various research communities. One such example is the continuing work on the "fast handovers for mobile IPv6" protocol that aims to reduce the packet loss and latency inherent to the handover process. In this document we present a set of experiments with an implementation of that protocol and the resulting performance evaluation. All tests take place over IEEE wireless LANs, and are performed using the fmipv6.org protocol implementation for the Linux operating system, that we have developed and contributed to the open source community. The paper, exposes an analysis of the provided results and brings out some issues, not currently addressed by the protocol, like for example connection and packet loss occurring during the IEEE 802.11 scanning procedure, and lack of more appropriate alternative mechanisms for discovery and selection of candidate access points. The purpose of the document is to provide evaluation material based on a link layer protocol that is (to our understanding) among the primary link layer protocols that FMIPv6 was built to work on. We find such an evaluation quite necessary for the pending optimisations of the protocol