Handover Latency of MIPv6 Implementation in Linux

Mobile IPv6 (MIPv6) is proposed to enable network applications to continuously operate at the required quality of service in the wire or wireless IP network. Handover latency of MIPv6 is the main cause of packet loss and performance degradation and is too long for real-time and throughput-sensitive applications. Enhancement of basic MIPv6 with respect to handover latency has been studied widely. A L3 handover procedure can be divided into four phases: Movement Detection, CoA Configuration, Home agent Registration and Route Optimization. The latencies in different handover phases have been measured in an operated wireless LAN (WLAN) in order to determine the performance bottleneck of handover. The effect of handover latency on the sliding window of TCP and application layer protocol is also parsed with experiment. Further more, we modify the MIPv6 implementations of Linux on mobile node and home agent to verify the potential of performance improvement for MIPv6 protocol. The experiment result can help the enhancement of MIPv6 and application development.