Experimental Study of Hierarchical Mobile IPv6 Handover Performance

In this paper the optimized handover mechanisms including the dual-interfaces hard handover and network-layer soft-handover are proposed to improve the handover performance when adopting the hierarchical mobile IPv6 (HMIPv6) protocol. A HMIPv6 test-bed based on Linux is set up and a series of experimental studies on network-layer handover are performed. From the test results we can see that the soft-handoff algorithm can provide the seamless and smooth user experience in the network overlapped regions, because the packet loss rate, delay and jitter are obviously improved due to the redundant packets transmission over multiple wireless links simultaneously.