Efficient Handoff Scheme for Heterogeneous IPv6-based Wireless Networks

Mobility management, with provision of seamless handoff and quality of service (QoS) guarantees, is one of the key issues in next generation or 4G wireless networks (NGWN/4G). Current trends in communication networks evolution are directed towards an all-IP principles in order to hide heterogeneities and to achieve convergence of various access networks. Several IPv6-based mobility management schemes have been proposed for service continuity in NGWN/4G. However, these schemes have some well-known disadvantages such as signaling traffic overhead, high packet loss and high handoff latency, thereby causing a user-perceptible deterioration of real-time applications. This paper proposes an efficient handoff protocol for NGWN/4G, called handoff protocol for integrated networks (HPIN), that alleviates service disruption during handoff. HPIN is a one suite protocol that performs local mobility management, fast handoff, context transfer and access network discovery. Performance evaluation based on numerical results shows that the proposed scheme performs better than existing schemes.