Optimizing the Performance of FMIPv6 by Proactive Proxy Bindings

IETF has proposed Fast Mobile IPv6 (FMIPv6) protocol, a seamless handover protocol, that reduces packet loss during the handover process by tunneling packets from the MN's previous IP subnet to the new IP subnet where they will get buffered. These buffered packets will get forwarded to the MN once it becomes IP capable in the new subnet. Although packet tunneling and buffering is an effective strategy to reduce packet loss during the handover process but it will not only incur a high tunneling load on the link between the previous and new subnets, especially for CBR traffic, but will also account towards increased processing load in the access routers due to successive tunneling and de-tunneling of packets. This tunneling load is also dependent on the timing of the FMIPv6 handover decision which in turn is directly dependent on the location and speed of the MN. In this paper we propose a mechanism called Proactive Bindings for FMIPv6 (PB-FMIPv6) which can remedy the above limitations. Simulation results have shown that our mechanism not only reduces the tunneling load during the handover process but it also decouples the handover decision from the location and/or speed of the MN.