An address configuration and confirmation scheme for seamless mobility support in IPv6 network

Abstract

IETF Mobile IP version 6 and its fast handover protocol are proposed to handle routing of packets to a mobile node when it has moved away from its home network. To do this, each time a mobile node moves to a new location, it configures and confirms its temporal IP address. In this paper, we study the impact of the address configuration and confirmation procedure on the IP handover latency. We first argue that the current strategies for the address configuration and confirmation are unnecessarily slow, so they prevent current protocols (e.g. MIPv6) from being used for real-time traffic. We present a new scheme that can completely eliminate the latency taken by the address configuration and confirmation from the handover latency, so it can be a substitute of the current strategies. A mathematical analysis is developed to show the benefits of our scheme. In the analysis, we compare our scheme with the existing proposals in terms of the handover latency.