Title: Seamless handover for multicast mobile IPv6 traffic

Authors: Georges Abou-Khalil; Suresh Krishnan; Samuel Pierre

Addresses: Department of Computer Engineering, École Polytechnique de Montréal, Montréal, Quebec, Canada ' Ericsson Canada, Montréal, Quebec, Canada ' Department of Computer Engineering, École Polytechnique de Montréal, Montréal, Quebec, Canada

Abstract: MIPv6 is an IETF protocol that manages mobility, allowing a MN to continue to be reachable after an IP address change, result of a handover. However, when multicast applications are used, this address change results in a disruption of the service, because of the packet loss that occurs while the MN is rejoining the multicast group. Hence, we propose a new multicast scheme that provides a seamless multicast service during a handover in a MIPv6 network. The proposed scheme achieves its goal by adding a new node, denoted the MBA, whose role is to buffer the packets when the MN is performing the handover. These packets would otherwise be lost. We present an analysis of the buffer sizes to find the optimal sizes. Simulation results, obtained with OPNET, show that by properly sizing the buffers, seamless multicast handover can be achieved with the proposed scheme.

Keywords: multicast applications; mobile IPv6; realtime traffic; seamless handover; vertical handover; mobility; buffer size; packet loss; simulation.

DOI: 10.1504/IJWMC.2014.063086

International Journal of Wireless and Mobile Computing, 2014 Vol.7 No.4, pp.308 - 317

Received: 31 Dec 2012
Accepted: 06 Sep 2013
Published online: 31 Oct 2014 *

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