Fast handover using multicast handover agents in PMIPv6-based wireless networks

This paper addresses the multicast handover in the wireless networks based on the Proxy Mobile IPv6 (PMIP). The existing PMIP-based multicast schemes tend to induce severe packet losses, large handover delays and unnecessary data transmissions during handover. To overcome these problems, we propose the use of Multicast Handover Agent (MHA) for fast handover. In the proposed scheme, called PMIP-MHA, each mobile access gateway (MAG) has a MHA, which maintains a cache to keep the list of active mobile nodes per multicast group. The MHA is used to stop unnecessary data transmissions when the last mobile node for the group leaves the network. The MHA also performs the fast join with its neighboring MHA during handover. From numerical analysis, it is shown that the proposed scheme can give better performance than the existing PMIP-based multicast handover schemes in terms of handover latency and packet loss.