Mobility and QoS support for IPv6-based real-time wireless Internet traffic

IPv6 (ipng) is expected to replace the current Internet protocol (IPv4) in the near future and it is most likely that mobile communications shall be supported by the IPv6 at the network layer. Mobile-IPv6 is currently in the standardization process. In addition to network mobility, real-time applications that run on mobile nodes have certain quality of service (QoS) requirements such as constraints on packet loss, delay and jitter. Prior bandwidth reservations at intermediate nodes along a path are required to guarantee the QoS; RSVP would most likely be employed for this purpose. IPv6 supports mobility to some extent. However, novel mechanisms are necessary to enable RSVP-based services to support real-time wireless Internet traffic. The mobility and hence the associated break-and-make of the routes from a correspondent to a mobile node makes the dynamic reservations on-the-fly very critical to the QoS sensitive real-time traffic. A number of issues related to maintaining QoS support for real-time wireless traffic are discussed. Further, an integrated approach (scheme) and its implementation addressing the issues for a better network mobility management and QoS for IPv6-based real-time wireless Internet traffic is proposed. The scheme is developed over the existing RSVP messages with slight extensions/modifications. The proposed scheme intelligently reduces the volume of signaling messages that have to be transmitted by the wireless mobile node leading to reduction in power consumption