Enhanced analytical method for IP mobility handover schemes cost evaluation

Seamless service delivery for mobile users complemented with Quality of Service provisioning for their real-time applications have a hot topic in the field of mobile communication in recent years. Seamless mobility goes hand in hand with Mobile IPv6 protocol. Since many different handover schemes trying to solve the Quality of Service issues have been developed a need for means for comparison has arisen. This paper presents an enhanced universal analytical method for comparison of handover schemes. The method focuses on two important aspects influencing the handover performance—binding update cost and packet delivery cost. The use of the proposed method is presented for comparison of four most common handover schemes—MIPv6, HMIPv6, FMIPv6 and F-HMIPv6.