A performance study of context transfer protocol for QoS support

In nowadays wireless networks, mobile users frequently access context dependent Internet services. During handover procedures, the management of context related information introduces additional overheads to transfer context-aware service sessions. The overhead due to context transfer procedures may affect the quality of service perceived by mobile users making more difficult to realize seamless handover procedures. Context Transfer Protocol can improve the QoS perceived by mobile nodes that access context dependent services. In this paper we extend motivations for context transfer, and we introduce three different scenarios for Context Transfer Protocol. We propose a performance model to compare these scenarios when context transfer protocol run on top of IPv6 with fast handover mechanisms.