An L3-driven fast handover mechanism in IPv6 mobility

Several fast handover mechanisms have been proposed to achieve seamless mobility in IPv6. These proposals assume that the network layer of a mobile node can use the link layer information. However, none of them defines how to abstract and utilize the link layer information. This paper defines the abstractions of the link layer information to achieve fast handover in IPv6. This paper also proposes a network layer (L3) driven fast handover mechanism by using the abstract link layer information. The L3-driven fast handover mechanism was implemented on FreeBSD. The measurement results show that the gap time of an L3 handover is only 3-4 msec in our outdoor test network consisting of eight IEEE 802.11a subnets.