Coordinating Fast Handover and Route Optimization in Proxy Mobile IPv6

PMIPv6 is a network-based protocol for the mobile device. To reduce handover delay and packet loss during mobile node´s handoff, similar proposals initially designed for MIPv6, i.e. fast handover and route optimization have been borrowed to improve the handover performance in PMIPv6. But we find that basically they are discussed separately up to now, which makes the whole process of handover more complicated and unfeasible. In this paper, we propose to coordinate fast handover and route optimization to make them benefit from each other, e.g. realizing route optimization concurrently with the proxy binding update with the information provided by fast handover mechanism, and meanwhile making use of the tunnel established by route optimization to buffer packets during fast handover. In order to illustrate the coordination function, two scenarios are used to explain the detailed signaling procedure. One is that all MAGs related to MN and CN stay under the same LMA, and the other is the opposite scenario, i.e. each MAG belongs to different LMA. Then a simplified analysis is given to quantitatively prove the improvement for handover delay. Finally, we conclude that the coordination mechanism can also save resource consumption for optimization as well as reduce packet loss.