Improving Mobile IPv6 handover and authentication in wireless network with E‐HCF

Mobile IP allows a mobile node to maintain a continuous connectivity to the Internet when moving from one access point to another. However, due to the link switching delay and to Mobile IP handover operations, packets designated to mobile nodes can be delayed or lost during the handover period. Moreover, every time a new attach point is confirmed, the mobile node, its home agent and its corresponding node must be authenticated mutually. This paper presents a new control function called Extended Handover Control Function (E‐HCF) in order to improve handover performance and authentication in the context of Mobile IPv6 over wireless networks. With an analytical model and some OPNET simulations, we show in this paper that our solution allows provision of low latency, low packet loss and mutual authentication to the standard handover of Mobile IPv6. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.