Access router information protocol with FMIPv6 for efficient handovers and their implementations

Mobile IPv6, which is a protocol being standardized by IETF for global IP mobility support, is expected to play a key role for future all-IP wireless networks. As the demands for delay sensitive real-time applications increase, the handover latency of mobile IPv6 becomes inadequate for these applications. There have been many proposals, such as fast handovers for mobile IPv6 (FMIPv6), to tackle this problem. However, FMIPv6 only concentrates on the protocol operation while it does not address other issues, such as radio access discovery and candidate access router discovery, that are critical to the handover performance of FMIPv6. Therefore, in this paper, we propose ARIP (access router information protocol), which performs a candidate access router discovery and a radio access network discovery in one protocol suite, to provide an efficient handover framework for MIPv6 and FMIPv6. ARIP is designed to cope with heterogeneous networks as well as homogeneous networks and to be closely coupled with FMIPv6 to provide an efficient handover operation. The performance evaluation of MIPv6, FMIPv6, and FMIPv6 with ARIP is performed in an actual network environment and the performance results show that FMIPv6 with ARIP gives the best performance in terms of handover latency