Enhancing QoS of Mobile Devices by a New Handover Process in PMIPv6 Networks

The handover processes in present IP mobility management protocols incur significant latency, thus aggravating QoS of consumer devices. In this paper, we introduce an enhanced handover process for the Proxy Mobile IPv6 (PMIPv6) protocol, which is a recently developed IP mobility management protocol aiming at providing network-based mobility support. The proposed handover process further improves handover performance of PMIPv6 by allowing a new access network obtains handover context before a consumer’s mobile node (MN) moves to the new access network. Data packets destined for the MN are buffered to prevent packet loss and immediately delivered to the MN as the MN moves to the new access network. We evaluate the handover latency and data packet loss of the proposed handover process compared to the basic one of PMIPv6. The conducted analysis results confirm that the proposed handover process yields the reduced handover latency compared to that of the basic PMIPv6 and also prevents data packet loss. We moreover evaluate the buffering cost of the proposed handover process.