RA-RA: a new bandwidth efficient scheme for movement detection in MIPv6

In networks supporting mobile IP, the address configuration of a mobile node is based on the detection of movement between different subnetworks. The movement detection in wireless IP network is usually performed by means of router advertisement messages. The higher is the rate of these messages, the lower the hand-off delay is and the higher is the bandwidth occupation on the wireless medium. In MIPv6, the interval of the advertisements is randomly varied between MinRtAdvint and MaxRtAdvint. In this paper, we propose and assess rate adjusted-router advertisement (RA-RA), a new mechanism to vary the advertisements rate in order to decrease the bandwidth occupation of these messages while confining part of the L3 handoff setup latency under acceptable values, for instance 15÷40ms. The benefit on the bandwidth occupation with respect to the MIPv6 technique is 25% ÷ 40%, depending on the interval of advertisements. Our technique is based on the windowing of the RA messages train, each window being placed at the predicted time instants of hand-off arrivals.