A Novel Handover Scheme with Improved Performance by Switching between Unicast Addressing and Anycast Addressing

An efficient handover schemes featuring anycast technique is developed and presented in this article. The proposed approach switches to anycast addressing during handover and switches back to normal unicast addressing after all required operations are done. By switching to anycast addressing, a mobile node can continue the reception of packets from its corresponding node before its new care-of address is actually validated. As a result, transmission disruption can be effectively minimized. In addition, a simple but effective buffer control scheme is designed to reduce the possible packet loss and to prevent the out-of-order problem. Analytical study reveals that improved performance can be guaranteed, as reflected in the simulation results.