PMIPv6 and MIH-enhanced PMIPv6 for mobility management in heterogeneous wireless networks

Next generation wireless networks will interwork hence combine resources of the available heterogeneous networks for connection support. Mobility across these networks will be inevitable. Thus, to support seamless connection migration between the networks, seamless handover is a necessary requirement. One of the requirements for ensuring seamless handover is the reduction of the delay that occurs during a handover procedure. Various mobility management protocols have been proposed and standardized to support mobility across heterogeneous networks but they cannot provide seamless handover in their current form. However, proxy mobile IPv6, which is a networked-based mobility management, goes a long way towards reducing handover delay. Enhancing it with a handover optimization mechanism, such as IEEE 802.21 MIH services, improves the handover performance even further. This paper therefore evaluates the performance of PMIPv6 versus PMIPv6 enhanced with MIH services. The results show that indeed PMIPv6 performs even better when enhanced with MIH in terms of reducing handover delay and reducing packet losses during handover across heterogeneous wireless networks.