Implementation and Analysis of FMIPv6, an Enhancement of MIPv6

The initial IP Mobility protocol was first presented in 1993 for IPv4. The Mobile IP protocol solves the TCP/IP Layer 3 mobility, by assigning a permanent IP address to the mobile node. Mobile IP consists of both MIPv4 and MIPv6, but IPv4 has a couple of drawbacks, the main one being IP address exhaustion, making MIPv6 the future option for mobility protocol in IP Networks. The main goal of the mobility protocol is to enable network applications to operate continuously at the required quality of service for both wired and wireless networks. MIPv6 uses the existing IPv6 protocol to enable seamless roaming between different access points. MIPv6 on its own needs optimization techniques to improve the handover latency of the protocol and to minimize the latency. This paper proposes FMIPv6 protocol to minimize handover latency. Both MIPv6 and FMIPv6 protocols introduce some new terminologies as proposed by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), which require prior familiarisation to understand the working of MIPv6 and FMIPv6.