Abstract
This paper reviews diverse IP mobility and fast handover mechanisms for seamless Internet services. Especially, fast handover mechanisms for the Proxy Mobile IPv6( PMIPv6) are categorized according to their approaches. Then, a new fast handover PMIPv6(FH-PMIPv6) mechanism is proposed using only L3 signaling message exchange. In the proposed FH-PMIPv6 mechanism, only local mobility anchor(LMA) exchanges L3 signaling messages with mobility access gateways(MAGs) for the fast handover operation. That is, inter-MAG signalling messages are not required for the fast handover operation. Therefore, unlike existing fast handover mechanisms, two relevant neighbouring MAGs need not set up the security association(SA) to protect fast handover related signaling messages and share SA related information. Moreover, the L3 triggering message is defined newly by standard ICMPv6 to trigger promptly the proposed mechanism. Analysis and comparison of the handover latency are performed for the proposed mechanism and existing mechanisms, which shows that the proposed FH-PMIPv6 mechanism has the favorable performance.