Towards Minimizing Service Degradation during MIPv6 Handovers

Since the correspondent registration messages in MIPv6 go through all the nodes that are responsible for QoS configuration after handover, we propose to extend the binding update (BU) messages of standard MIPV6 to carry scheme-dependent QoS data. Correspondent registration is performed by these new agent update (AU) messages. The AU messages are intercepted by QoS Agents, which are located in the "critical" nodes that are responsible for QoS configuration. Thus by the time that the correspondent registration is complete, the QoS configuration has also been updated along the data path, which minimizes the service degradation due to handover. This approach also provides a unified solution for heterogeneous QoS schemes that may be applied along the data path