Enhanced HMIPv6 with cascaded tunnel

Hierarchical Mobile IPv6 (HMIPv6) is designed to reduce the handover latency and signaling load of Mobile IPv6 (MIPv6). However, HMIPv6 only improves local mobility performance while the handover latency in the inter-Mobility Anchor Point (MAP) handover is still long and packet transmission cost is still heavy due to the overlapped tunnels. In this paper, we propose a cascaded tunnel scheme in HMIPv6 to reduce its handover latency and signaling cost. In the proposed scheme, the home registration of Mobile Node (MN) is conducted by the MAP in a network-based manner and the global tunnel is established between MAP and Home Agent (HA), which allows the MN to originate only the local registration signaling even during its inter-MAP handover. The improvements contributed by the proposed scheme over the basic HMIPv6 are shown to be significant from the analyzing results.