Fast handover control scheme for multi-node using the group-based approach

The fast handover Mobile IPv6 (FMIPv6) offers a handover preparation mechanism for a mobile node (MN) to reduce the handover latency over wireless network. However, FMIPv6 mainly deals with one MN instead of multiple MNs. In the wireless network, a group of MNs may move from the same previous network to the next network. In this paper, a group-based fast handover (GB-FH) control scheme is proposed to resolve the aforementioned problem. For the proposed GB-FH scheme, one MN initiates a handover preparation and other neighboring MNs can join the handover preparation using the “hitch-and-ride” concept, which means that when one MN is preparing for a handover, its neighbours can join the on-going handover preparation. Through the use of the shared invocation of the handover preparation procedure, (1) the handover preparation delay and handover latency can be reduced for about 20% and 8% respectively comparing with FMIPv6, (2) handover control messages can be reduced for about 57% comparing with FMIPv6 and (3) the contention of the wireless channel for multiple MNs can be improved due to the use of fewer control messages.