A Smooth Handover Scheme for Fast-Moving Users in Mobile IPv6 Networks

As the rapid development of wireless technologies and increasing communication need of people in ubiquitous environment, some handover schemes and improvements were proposed by the IETF in order to support mobility effectively. In addition, mobile Stream Control Transmission Protocol (mSCTP) proposed by the IETF is a new transport protocol supporting mobility and with a built-in feature called Multi-homing has attracted much attention from the research communities. Multi-homing is convenient to introduce IP diversity in mobility management. A seamless handover architecture called SIGMA based on mSCTP has better performance than Mobile IPv6 enhancements. However, the handover performance in SIGMA remains low if the mobile host moves at a fast speed. Aiming at this problem, we propose SHSBM, a Smooth Handover Scheme based-on mSCTP. SHSBM adopts the advantage of SIGMA, and utilize Buffer and Tunnel to better serve fast-moving users. Additionally, we propose two strategies to solve the problem caused by Buffer-scheme—sequence Out of Order. Criteria for performance evaluation including the packets’ loss rate, throughput and handover latency compared with SIGMA and Mobile IPv6 enhancements.