PMIPv6-based mobility management in WLAN

Wireless local area network has been widely deployed for providing data services, however, the problem of mobility management in WLAN, i.e., users perform handoff among various access points, fails to be studied extensively. In this paper, the mobility management protocol PMIPv6 is applied in the access controller-based WLAN system. The integrated system architecture is introduced and the message flow for mobility management under the architecture is described. To achieve protocol performance enhancement, a multicast-based mobility management scheme is presented, several implementation issues are considered, and the performance evaluation is conducted. Numerical results demonstrate that the proposed multicast-based mobility management scheme offers handoff latency decrease and negligible packet loss.