Extension of MIH to Support FPMIPv6 for Optimized Heterogeneous Handover

Fast handover for Proxy Mobile IPv6 (FPMIPv6) can reduce handover delay and packet loss compared with Proxy Mobile IPv6 (PMIPv6). However, FPMIPv6 still cannot handle heterogeneous handovers due to the lack of unified Layer 2 triggering mechanism along with the booming of emerging wireless technologies. Media Independent Handover (MIH) can provide heterogeneous handover support, and a lot of integration solutions have been proposed for it. However, most of them focus on the integration of MIH and PMIPv6, and require the additional mechanisms, which are out of the scope the MIH and difficult to standardize the operations. Therefore, in this paper, we propose an integration solution of FPMIPv6 and MIH by extending the existing MIH standards, and adopt the city section mobility model to analyze its performance under different scenarios. The analytical results show that the proposed solution is capable of reducing the handover delay and the signaling cost compared with the standard as well as the fast handover solutions.