A Scalable Fast Handovers Proxy Mobile IPv6 Scheme for 4G Wireless Networks

Proxy Mobile IPv6 (PMIPv6) is one of the most promising mobility solutions for the next generation wireless networks. PMIPv6 has been recommended for the Third generation partnership project’s (3GPP) Evolved Packet Core (EPC) and has been adopted by the WiMAX forum. However, PMIPv6 in its current state does not attain the stringent handover performance required to support high quality of service (QoS) for real time services. To improve PMIPv6's handover performance, bicasting schemes for PMIPv6 have been proposed in the literature to minimize packet loss and handover delay during a PMIPv6 handover. However, existing bicasting schemes for PMIPv6 require a significant amount of backhaul bandwidth as well as buffer space to attain a seamless handover. Therefore, this paper studies bicasting schemes for PMIPv6 and consequently proposes an enhanced bicasting scheme for PMIPv6 that not only reduces the handover delay and packet loss but also efficiently utilizes the scarce and shared network resources to ensure scalability. The proposed solution uses the signal strength behavior to make decisions on when to start and stop bicasting. A model of the proposed solution is implemented and incorporated into the Network simulator-2 (NS-2). The results obtained indeed show that the proposed solution surpasses currently existing solutions.