Handoff performance of mobile host and mobile router employing HMIP extension

Mobility support for mobile networks will be more important as the mobile Internet becomes increasingly popular. To support mobile networks, the concept of prefix scope binding (PSB) is being discussed in IETF; however, by only applying this concept to Mobile IPv6 (MIP), the problem of packet loss still remains. In this paper, we apply the PSB concept to our proposed protocol, the hierarchical Mobile IPv6 extension with buffering function (HMIP-B), in which mobility anchor points buffer packets destined to the mobile hosts during handoff. We compare MIP and HMIP-B based on the handoff performance related to mobile networks by computer simulation. The simulation results indicate that our proposal improves the handoff performance in both TCP and UDP communications.