EFH: An edge-based fast handover for mobile IPv6 in IEEE 802.11b WLAN

Mobile IPv6 has been designed to manage movements of mobile nodes among wireless IPv6 networks. Nevertheless, a mobile node cannot receive IP packets on its new point of attachment until the handover completes. Therefore, a number of extensions of Mobile IPv6 such as FMIPv6 and HMIPv6 have been proposed to reduce the handover latency and the number of lost packets. In this paper, a new mechanism based on information of edge APs is proposed for fast handover. The proposed mechanism provides the faster acquisition of neighboring subnet information than that of FMIPv6. In addition the information of the subnets is used more flexibly to determine L2 handover or L3 handover. Moreover, the proposed mechanism can reduce amount of traffic and the handover latency in comparison with the FMIPv6 during the handover. This research focuses on Fast Handover for MIPv6 which is an extension of Mobile IPv6 that allows the use of L2 triggers to anticipate the handover. The results of the handover latency are calculated with the L2 properties of IEEE 802.11b. In particular, we take into account the L2 handover and the L3 handover for two fast handover scenarios of the wireless networks.