Improving Inter-Domain Fast Handover Using MIH Services in Mobile WiMAX

摘要

Recently, the IP connectivity during the Mobile Node (MN) movement between Base Stations (BSs) belonging to different Internet Service Providers (ISPs) is still a key issue to be tackled. In this paper, therefore, we develop a new scheme to improve the performance of inter-domain fast handover over mobile WiMAX networks. The framework basically relies on the Fast Handover for Mobile IPv6 protocol (FMIPv6) when the Media Independent Information Services (MIIS) as defined in IEEE802.21 standard is applied to enable the Mobile Node in storing the information of the neighboring networks. A Fully Qualified Domain Name (FQDN) is also used to identify the IP address of the previous network operator and the MN during its movements. Since both MIIS and FQDN can support the node mobility between multiple domains, our proposed scheme can also be called P-FMIPv6. The numerical results show that the latency of IP connectivity of this proposed handover can be significantly reduced in addition to less service disruption time during handovers as compared to the existing FMIPv6 when IEEE802.16e network is considered.