An enhanced fast handover triggering mechanism for Fast Proxy Mobile IPv6

Handover delay performance is a critical issue to support real-time applications in wireless networks. To address this issue, this paper presents an Enhanced fast handover Triggering Mechanism (ETM) to improve the handover performance of mobile nodes (MNs) in Fast Proxy Mobile IPv6 (FPMIPv6). Making use of the information from the link layer, the ETM predicts two cases that the MNs perform in the reactive handover mode. Then, it establishes the bi-directional tunnel in advance for fast handover. As a result, the reactive handover delay is significantly reduced. Integrating the ETM into FPMIPv6 forms an enhanced Fast Proxy Mobile IPv6 (eFPMIPv6) protocol. Simulation experiments show that with the presented ETM mechanism, the eFPMIPv6 outperforms the original FPMIPv6 in terms of the overall handover performance.