An Experimental Study on Fast Handovers for Mobile IPv6

The handover procedures in Mobile IPv6 (MIPv6) often affect the quality of particular services such as delay-sensitive applications and loss-sensitive applications. Fast Handovers for MIPv6 (FMIPv6) protocol, where operation can be classified into the predictive mode and the reactive mode, is proposed to alleviate the unacceptable effect. In this paper, we implement FMIPv6 in a real test-bed environment and study its performance in terms of handover latency and packet loss. Especially, effects of the anticipation time are carefully considered. Predictive fast handover generally outperforms reactive fast handover, but it requires a sufficient anticipation time to complete necessary operations before the current network is broken. In our test-bed, cross-layer interactions between the link layer and the network layer are introduced to achieve successful predictive fast handover with an optimal anticipation time. We also tackle the implementation of link layer triggers which are critical to the performance of fast handovers.