Design of fast handover mechanism for multiple interfaces mobile IPv6

This paper proposes an extension to Fast-handover Mobile IPv6 [6] that improves handover latency in Mobile IPv6 procedures in case mobile nodes have multiple wireless interfaces. In the basic Fast MIPv6 [6], a previous access router (PAR) forwards arriving packets for the mobile node to a new access router (NAR) by setting up a tunnel to the NAR in order to prevent packet losses incurred by latency during handover procedure. However, in the Mobile IPv6 with multiple care of address (CoA) registrations, packet tunneling to a NAR during handover of one interface can incur performance degradation due to severe packet reordering when multiple interfaces are simultaneously used for load sharing. This is because the partial traffic flow coming from the interface involved in handover is suspended during handover and later tunneled to a NAR, while the other partial traffic flow is continuously forwarded to the mobile node through other stable interfaces. We thus propose in this paper an extension to Fast handover Mobile IPv6 procedure which can indicate a specific tunneling destination except the NAR, for example, other interfaces (or CoAs) in the same mobile node. This extension not only enhances the traffic quality during handoff but also improves the handover signaling performance because data traffic is redirected to another interface during handover signaling.