Improving the Performance of Fast Handovers in Mobile IPv6

The fast handovers for mobile IPv6 protocol has been proposed to improve handover latency due to mobile IPv6 procedures. However, in practice, the performance of fast handovers suffers from problems such as the predictive latency and reactive loss. To address these problems, in this paper, cross-layer interactions between the link layer and the network layer are introduced. First, we propose a network controlled link layer trigger on the mobile node to reduce the predictive latency. Moreover, the network controlled link layer trigger can also configure a reduced set of potential channels during scanning. Further, we propose a link triggered buffering mechanism on the access router to alleviate packet loss in reactive fast handover. Experiments in an IEEE 802.11 based test-bed show that the proposed schemes improve the performance of fast handovers in terms of handover latency and packet loss.