Fast RSVP: Efficient RSVP Mobility Support for Mobile IPv6

In recent years, with the development of mobile communication technologies and the increase of available wireless transmission bandwidth, deploying multimedia services in next generation mobile IPv6 networks has become an inevitable trend. RSVP (resource reservation protocol) proposed by the IETF is designed for hardwired and fixed networks and can not be used in mobile environments. This paper proposes a protocol, called Fast RSVP, to reserve resources for mobile IPv6. The protocol adopts a cross-layer design approach where two modules (RSVP module and Mobile IPv6 module) at different layers cooperate with each other. Fast RSVP divides a handover process with QoS guarantees into two stages: (1) setup of the resource reservation neighbor tunnel and (2) resource reservation on the optimized route. It can help a mobile node realize fast handover with QoS guarantees as well as avoid resource wasting by triangular routes, advanced reservations and duplicate reservations. In addition, fast RSVP reserves "guard channels" for handover sessions, thus greatly reducing the handover session forced termination rate while maintaining high performance of the network. Based on extensive performance analysis and simulations, Fast RSVP, compared with existing methods of resource reservation in mobile environments, performs better in terms of packet delay and throughput during handover, QoS recovery time after handover, resource reservation cost, handover session forced termination rate and overall session completion rate.