Improving handover performance by switching between unicast and multicast addressing

Efficient handover schemes are essential to the success of mobile networking. However, there are time-consuming procedures involved in the process, such as duplicate address detection, packet buffering and tunneling. A novel scheme featuring multicast technique is developed and presented in this article. The proposed approach switches to multicast addressing during handover and switches back to normal unicast addressing after all required operations are done. By switching to multicast addressing, a mobile node can continue the reception of packets from its corresponding node before its new care-of address is actually validated. As a result, transmission disruption can be effectively minimized. In addition, a simple but effective buffer control scheme is designed to reduce the possible packet loss and to prevent the out-of-order problem. Analytical study reveals that improved performance can be guaranteed, as reflected in the simulation results.