A fast handover M-MANET with QoS support

Looking at the progress of mobile-IP in the recent years, there's a sense that IP (for QoS support, IPv6 more specifically) is going to be involved more and more in wireless applications. The current IETF standard for mobility is the Mobile IP (RFC 3344 for IPv4 and RFC 3775 for IPv6) both work by changing the IP address when changing the subnet. Both Mobile IPv4 and IPv6 suffer from longer handover delays mainly due to AAA (authentication, authorization and accounting) signalling and IP address configuration. There are numerous proposals out there, which try to either optimize Mobile IP or use different mechanisms for a certain domain. What proposed here is the deployment of existing technologies binding to a new approach in handling QoS and smooth and technology independent handoffs, thanks to the MPLS mechanism and to the adaptive characteristics of Mobile Adhoc Networks (MANETs). This paper discusses a mechanism for a fast handoff in Mobile-IPv6 architecture. Fast handoff in mobile-IP is used for facilitating applications such as videoconferencing, Internet telephony, and other applications that require minimal delays and packet drops. In our proposal, multipath routing approach facilitates the communication between M-MANET entities "Mobile Node (MN), Correspondent Nodes (CN), and Home Agent (HA)". These entities are all IPv6-Ad-Hoc-MPLS-ready elements and this is an MPLS Mobile-IPv6 Ad-Hoc Network (M-MANET) topology, therefore QoS will be maintained through the usage of this integration. With simulation results we discuss the overall functionality. © 2005 IEEE.