The Use of SCTP Failover Mechanism for Efficient Network Handover on Mobile IPv6

In the near future, mobile communication will become majority on the Internet according to quick progress of wireless technology and mobility protocols. Mobile IPv6 has been standardized at IETF and almost ready to deploy on the Internet. However, handover technology of Mobile IPv6 is still under development. Since Mobile IPv6 does not specify optimized handover mechanism, it takes certain period to complete handover. In this paper, we investigate a mechanism to minimize handover latency without any modification to Mobile IPv6. We take position that a mobile node will utilize multiple interfaces to achieve smooth handover. With multiple interfaces, the Internet access can be continued even while Mobile IPv6´s movement is proceeded. SCTP is a transport protocol capable of handling multiple addresses for each session. A mobile node uses a home address as a primary address and another available address as a secondary address. The SCTP fails over to the secondary address while the primary address (i.e. home address) is inactive during handover. The advantage of this proposal is that it required modification to neither Mobile IPv6 and SCTP.