CoMoRoHo: Cooperative Mobile Router-Based Handover Scheme for Long-Vehicular Multihomed Networks

To support multimedia applications effectively in mobile networks, the handover latency or packet losses during handover should be very small. Addressing this issue, we present a cooperative mobile router-based handover (CoMoRoHo) scheme for long-vehicular multihomed mobile networks. The basic idea behind CoMoRoHo is to enable different mobile routers to access different subnets during a handover and cooperatively receive packets destined for each other. In general, packet losses are directly proportional to handover latency; however, the overlapped reception of packets from different subnets makes possible to minimize packet losses even without reducing handover latency. To evaluate the scheme, we carried out performance modeling of the CoMoRoHo scheme in comparison with the Fast Handover for Mobile IPv6 (FMIPv6) protocol in regard to the handover latency, packet loss, signaling overhead, and packet delivery overhead in access networks. The analysis results show that CoMoRoHo outperforms FMIPv6 by reducing the packet losses as well as signaling overheads by more than 50%. Moreover, CoMoRoHo imposes lower packet delivery overheads required for preventing packets from being dropped from access routers. We thus conclude that CoMoRoHo is a scalable scheme because its performance remains intact even when the access network is overloaded.