A Robust Seamless Handover Scheme for the Support of Multimedia Services in Heterogeneous Emerging Wireless Networks

With the rapid development of wireless technologies and numerous types of mobile devices, the need to support seamless multimedia services in Mobile and Ubiquitous Computing (MUC) is growing. To support the seamless handover, several mobility protocols such as Mobile IPv6 (MIPv6) (Johnson et al., Mobility Support in IPv6, IETF, RFC 3775, 2004) and fast handover for the MIPv6 (FMIPv6) (Koodli et al. Past handovers for mobile IPv6 (FMIPv6), IETF, RFC 4068, 2005) were developed. However, MIPv6 depreciates the Quality-of-Service (QoS) especially in multimedia service applications because of the long handover latency and packet loss problem. To solve these problems in the MIPv6, FMIPv6 is proposed in the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). However, FMIPv6 is not robust for the multimedia services in heterogeneous emerging wireless networks when the MN may move to another visited network in contrast with its anticipation. In MUC, the possibility of service failure is more increased because mobile users can frequently change the access networks according to their mobility in heterogeneous wireless access networks such as 3Generation (3G), Wireless Fidelity (Wi-Fi), Worldwide Interoperability for Microwave Access (WiMax) and Bluetooth co-existed. In this paper, we propose a robust seamless handover scheme for the multimedia services in heterogeneous emerging wireless networks. The proposed scheme reduces the handover latency and handover initiation time when handover may fail through the management of tentative Care-of Addresses (CoAs) that does not require Duplicate Address Detection (DAD). Through performance evaluation, we show that our scheme provides more robust handover mechanism than other scheme such as FMIPv6 for the multimedia services in heterogeneous emerging wireless networks.