A Novel Buffer Mechanism for Fast Handovers in Mobile IPv6

The anticipation time has a significant impact on the performance of fast handover, especially predictive fast handover. Predictive fast handover which generally outperforms reactive fast handover requires a sufficient anticipation time to complete necessary operations before the current network is broken. However, the anticipation time may spur packets for the mobile node (MN) to be forwarded to the new access router (NAR) while the MN is still connected to the previous access router (PAR). These packets are either delayed in the NAR's buffer or lost. To address such problem, in this paper, we propose a link triggered buffer mechanism (LT-buffer). The basic idea behind the LT-buffer is to utilize the advantage of cross-layer interactions between the link layer and the network layer so that the delay time for packets in the buffer can be reduced. Moreover, the LT-buffer mechanism can trigger buffering on the PAR to reduce packet loss in reactive fast handover. Finally, we evaluate the effect of the LT-buffer.