Most of the IP mobility management schemes based on the IETF's MIPv6 may not be suitable for delay-sensitive vehicular applications since there will be frequent service disruptions as the moving vehicles frequently change their points of wireless network attachment. This paper presents a fast IP mobility management scheme for vehicular networks where multiple wireless network interfaces are used to perform fast handovers without handover latency or packet loss. In order to do this, the IETF standard HMIPv6 has been extended, where multiple simultaneous tunnels between the HMIPv6 mobility anchor point (MAP) and the mobile gateway are dynamically constructed. We have designed the architecture for a mobile gateway for supporting multiple tunnels, the structure of the extension MAP (E-MAP), and the signaling procedure to achieve fast IP handover in vehicular networks. Both mathematical analysis and simulation have been done for performance evaluation. The results show that the proposed scheme is superior to HMIPv6 and MIPv6 with regard to handover latency and packet loss as the vehicle moves between different wireless network cells at high speed.

This paper proposes a heterogeneous wireless network with handover in the application layer. The proposed network requires no upgrade of wireless infrastructure and mobile terminals to convert the present homogeneous networks to the proposed heterogeneous network. Only installing application programs on the content server side and the mobile terminal side is required. The performance of the proposed network has been evaluated in a field trial using a mobile broadband wireless access (MBWA) air interface with wide coverage and a wireless local area network (WLAN) air interface with high throughput. The field trial results show that the maximum value of the handover outage time is only 170 ms. The proposed heterogeneous wireless network is promising since both high throughput and wide coverage area are attained by a combination of the proposed handover scheme with the present homogeneous wireless networks.

Mobility Robustness Optimization (MRO) is one of the most important goals in LTE-Advanced Self-Organizing Networks (SON). Seamless handover in femtocell network is urgent and challenging, which has not been paid enough attention. Handover decision parameters, such as Time-To-Trigger (TTT), Hysteresis, Cell Individual Offset (CIO), have great effect on mobility performance, which may lead to Radio Link Failures (RLFs) and Unnecessary Handover. This letter proposes a handover parameters optimization approach based on Ant Colony Algorithm in the femtocell networks. The simulation result shows that the proposed scheme has a better performance than the fixed parameters method.

Many researchers have recently studied various applications such as Inter-Vehicle Communications (IVC) and Road-to-Vehicle Communications (RVC) for Intelligent Transport Systems (ITS). RVC is a key technology that can connect vehicles with the internet through Road Side Units (RSUs). Relative positions between vehicles vary within short periods of time. Neighboring vehicles and barriers cause shadowing that blocks communication for extended periods of time between RSUs and vehicles. We propose a fast scheme of Mobile IPv6 handover using dual-band communications in RVC. This scheme uses ISM and UHF dual bands. It switches to the UHF band during handover or in the shadowing period. We demonstrate that the proposed scheme can establish continuous communications through computer simulations.

A MANEMO node is an IP-based mobile node that has interface attachments to both a mobile network, using Network Mobility (NEMO), and a Mobile Ad Hoc Network (MANET). While communicating with a correspondent node in the Internet, the MANEMO node should use the best possible path. Therefore, as conditions change, a handover between NEMO and MANET is desirable. This paper describes the operation of a MANEMO handover when IEEE 802.11 is used. An analytical model illustrates that packet loss during a MANEMO handover may severely affect data and real-time applications. We therefore propose using buffering during the handover, by making use of the Power Save Mode in IEEE 802.11. In the proposed algorithm, a MANEMO node may rapidly switch between the two interfaces, eventually receiving packets delivered via the old network interface while initiating the Mobile IP/NEMO handover on the new interface. Performance results show that packet loss can be significantly reduced, with small and acceptable increases in signalling overhead and end-to-end delay.

Femtocell is considered a promising solution for indoor service enhancement in IEEE 802.16e cellular systems. However, the scanning scheme of IEEE 802.16e is not suitable for direct use in scanning femtocells in terms of efficiency and scan duration. In this paper, we propose an efficient scanning scheme for femtocells in IEEE 802.16e systems. The proposed scheme can achieve a lower scanning overhead by reducing the number of femtocells needed to be scanned. Numerical results show that the proposed scanning scheme can reduce the control message overhead and the scan duration.

In this paper, a preemptive priority queueing model is developed to derive the system dwelling time of secondary calls in a cognitive radio system in which a primary call's reoccupation of the channel is modeled as a preemptive event that forces a secondary call to attempt a spectrum handover. The suspension of secondary call service which may happen when the immediate spectrum handover fails, is included in our computation of the system dwelling time. The results are helpful in evaluating cognitive radio systems in terms of service delay and in determining system design parameters such as required buffer size and system capacity.

This paper introduces a hard handover strategy with a novel adaptive hysteresis adjustment that is needed to reduce handover drop rate in 3GPP long term evolution (LTE). First of all, we adopt a Hybrid handover scheme considering both the received signal strength (RSS) and the load information of the adjacent evolved Node Bs (eNBs) as a factor for deciding the target eNB. The Hybrid scheme causes the load status between the adjacent eNBs to be largely similar. Then, we propose a modified load-based adaptive hysteresis scheme to find a suitable handover hysteresis value utilizing the feature of the small load difference between the target and serving eNBs obtained from the result of the Hybrid scheme. As a result, through the proposed modified load-based adaptive hysteresis scheme, the best target cell is very well selected according to the dynamically changing communication environments. The simulation results show that the proposed scheme provides good performance in terms of handover drop rate.

Quite recently [IEEE Commu. Letters, Vol.14, No.1, 2010], Choi et al. proposed a handover authentication scheme using credentials based on chameleon hashing, claiming to provide several security features including Perfect Forward/Backward Secrecy (PFS/PBS). This paper examines the security of the scheme and shows that the scheme still fails to achieve PFS/PBS unlike their claims.

In PMIPv6, all packets sent by mobile nodes or correspondent nodes are transferred through the local mobility anchor. This unnecessary detour results in high delivery latency and significant processing cost. Several PMIPv6 route optimization schemes have been proposed to solve this issue. However, they also suffer from the high signaling costs when determining the optimized path. The proposed scheme which adopts the prediction algorithm in PFMIPv6 can reduce the signaling costs of the previous schemes. Analytical performance evaluation is performed to show the effectiveness of the proposed scheme.

IEEE 802.16m is an advanced air interface standard which is under development for IMT-Advanced systems, known as 4G systems. IEEE 802.16m is designed to provide a high data rate and a Quality of Service (QoS) level in order to meet user service requirements, and is especially suitable for mobilized environments. There are several factors that have great impact on such requirements. As one of the major factors, we mainly focus on latency issues. In IEEE 802.16m, an enhanced layer 2 handover scheme, described as Entry Before Break (EBB) was proposed and adopted to reduce handover latency. EBB provides significant handover interruption time reduction with respect to the legacy IEEE 802.16 handover scheme. Fast handovers for mobile IPv6 (FMIPv6) was standardized by Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) in order to provide reduced handover interruption time from IP layer perspective. Since FMIPv6 utilizes link layer triggers to reduce handover latency, it is very critical to jointly design FMIPv6 with its underlying link layer protocol. However, FMIPv6 based on new handover scheme, EBB has not been proposed. In this paper, we propose an improved cross-layering design for FMIPv6 based on the IEEE 802.16m EBB handover. In comparison with the conventional FMIPv6 based on the legacy IEEE 802.16 network, the overall handover interruption time can be significantly reduced by employing the proposed design. Benefits of this improvement on latency reduction for mobile user applications are thoroughly investigated with both numerical analysis and simulation on various IP applications.

To deal with the increasing number of mobile devices accessing the Internet and the increasing demands of mobility management, IETF has proposed Mobile IPv6 and its fast handover protocol FMIPv6. In FMIPv6, the possibility of Care-of Address (CoA) collision and the time for Return Routability (RR) procedure result in long handover delay, which makes it unsuitable for real-time applications. In this paper, we propose an improved handover scheme for FMIPv6, which reduces the handover delay by using proactive CoA acquisition, configuration and test method. In our proposal, collision-free CoA is proactively prepared, and the time for RR procedure does not contribute to the handover delay. Furthermore, we analyze our proposal's benefits and overhead tradeoff. The numerical results demonstrate that it outperforms the current schemes, such as FMIPv6 and enhanced FMIPv6, on the aspect of handover delay and packet transmission delay.

Motivated by the fact that the existing FMIPv6 security scheme has several weaknesses in terms of security and efficiency, we propose a security-enhanced fast mobile IPv6 in this letter. Based on the concept of a secret key-based CGA (Cryptographically Generated Address), we show how to establish a new security association between the MN and AR (Access Router) whenever a handover occurs. We also show that the proposed scheme is robust against several types of security attacks feasible with the existing scheme. Our scheme is more efficient in that it requires fewer public key operations.

This paper considers a new reactive fast handover MIPv6 (FMIPv6) mechanism to minimize packet loss of the existing mechanism. The primary idea of the proposed reactive FMIPv6 mechanism is that the serving access router buffers packets toward the mobile node (MN) as soon as the link layer between MN and serving base station is disconnected. To implement the proposed mechanism, the router discovery message exchanged between MN and serving access router is extended. In addition, the IEEE 802.21 Media Independent Handover Function event service message is defined newly. Through analytic performance evaluation and experiments, the proposed reactive FMIPv6 mechanism can be shown to minimize packet loss much than the existing mechanism.

This paper investigates the gain of inter-Node B macro diversity for a scheduled-based shared channel using single-carrier FDMA radio access in the Evolved UTRA (UMTS Terrestrial Radio Access) uplink based on system-level simulations. More specifically, we clarify the gain of inter-Node B soft handover (SHO) with selection combining at the radio frame length level (=10 msec) compared to that for hard handover (HHO) for a scheduled-based shared data channel, considering the gains of key packet-specific techniques including channel-dependent scheduling, adaptive modulation and coding (AMC), hybrid automatic repeat request (ARQ) with packet combining, and slow transmission power control (TPC). Simulation results show that the inter-Node B SHO increases the user throughput at the cell edge by approximately 10% for a short cell radius such as 100-300 m due to the diversity gain from a sudden change in other-cell interference, which is a feature specific to full scheduled-based packet access. However, it is also shown that the gain of inter-Node B SHO compared to that for HHO is small in a macrocell environment when the cell radius is longer than approximately 500 m due to the gains from hybrid ARQ with packet combining, slow TPC, and proportional fairness based channel-dependent scheduling.

A number of inter-cell interference coordination schemes have been proposed to mitigate the inter-cell interference problem for orthogonal frequency division multiple access (OFDMA) systems and among them, partial frequency reuse is considered one of the most promising approaches. In this paper, we propose an inter-cell interference mitigation scheme for an OFDMA downlink system, which makes use of both partial frequency reuse and soft handover. The basic idea of this hybrid scheme is to dynamically select between a partial frequency reuse scheme and a soft handover scheme to provide better signal quality for cell edge users. Compared with the standard partial frequency reuse scheme, simulation results show that approximately one quarter of cell edge users can get improvements in signal quality as well as link spectral efficiency from using the proposed hybrid scheme. We also observe that by using our approach, there is a significant cell edge throughput gain over the standard partial frequency reuse scheme. Furthermore, based on a well defined data rate fairness criterion, we show that our method achieves higher overall system capacity as compared with the standard partial frequency reuse scheme.

In this paper, a new handover procedure for OFDM-based multi-hop relay systems is proposed to reduce handover overhead by distinguishing an inter-cell handover event from an intra-cell handover event at the level of the physical layer using a preamble with a hierarchical design. A Subcell ID concept used to identify relay station in a cell is proposed in the hierarchical design that works in conjunction with the existing Cell ID used to identify base station. The proposed handover procedure can simplify the scanning procedure and skip/simplify the network re-entry procedure, resulting in a significant reduction in handover overhead.

Proxy Mobile IPv6 (PMIPv6) has been proposed in order to overcome the limitations of host-based mobility management in IPv6 networks. However, packet losses during doing handover are still a problem. To solve this issue, several schemes have been developed, and can be classified into two approaches: predictive and reactive handover. Both approaches commonly use bi-directional tunnel between mobile access gateways (MAGs). In predictive schemes especially, mobility support for a mobile node (MN) is triggered by simplified link signal strength. Thereafter, the MN sends handover notification to its serving MAG, and is then able to initiate packet forwarding. Therefore, if the MN moves toward an unexpected MAG that does not have any pre-established tunnel with the serving MAG, it may lead to packet losses. In this paper, we define this problem as Early Packet Forwarding (EPF). As a solution, we propose an enhanced PMIPv6 scheme using two-phase tunnel control based on the IEEE 802.21 Media Independent Handover (MIH).

A microcellular network will be a good candidate for the future broadband mobile network. It is expected to support high-bit-rate connection for many fast mobile users if the handover is processed fast enough to lessen its impact on QoS requirements. One of the promising techniques is believed to use for the wireless interface in such a microcellular network is the WLAN (Wireless LAN) technique due to its very high wireless channel rate. However, the less capability of mobility support of this technique must be improved to be able to expand its utilization for the microcellular environment. The reason of its less support mobility is large handover latency delay caused by contention-based handover to the new BS (base station) and delay of re-forwarding data from the old to new BS. This paper presents a proposal of multi-polling and dynamic LMC (Logical Macro Cell) to reduce mentioned above delays. Polling frame for an MT (Mobile Terminal) is sent from every BS belonging to the same LMC -- a virtual single macro cell that is a multicast group of several adjacent micro-cells in which an MT is communicating. Instead of contending for the medium of a new BS during handover, the MT responds to the polling sent from that new BS to enable the transition. Because only one BS of the LMC receives the polling ACK (acknowledgement) directly from the MT, this ACK frame has to be multicast to all BSs of the same LMC through the terrestrial network to continue sending the next polling cycle at each BS. Moreover, when an MT hands over to a new cell, its current LMC is switched over to a newly corresponding LMC to prevent the future contending for a new LMC. By this way, an MT can do handover between micro-cells of an LMC smoothly because the redundant resource is reserved for it at neighboring cells, no need to contend with others. Our simulation results using the OMNeT++ simulator illustrate the performance achievements of the multi-polling and dynamic LMC scheme in eliminating handover latency, packet loss and keeping mobile users' throughput stable in the high traffic load condition though it causes somewhat overhead on the neighboring cells.

With the increasing deployment of mobile devices and the advent of broadband wireless access systems such as WiBro, mWiMAX, and HSDPA, an efficient IP mobility management protocol becomes one of the most important technical issues for the successful deployment of the broadband wireless data networking service. IETF has proposed the Mobile IPv6 as the basic mobility management protocol for IPv6 networks. To enhance the performance of the basic MIPv6, researchers have been actively working on HMIPv6 and FMIPv6 protocols. In this paper, we propose a new mobility management protocol, HIMIPv6 (Highly Integrated MIPv6), which tightly integrates the hierarchical mobility management mechanism of the HMIPv6 and the proactive handover support of the FMIPv6 to enhance the handover performance especially for the cellular networking environment with high frequent handover activities. We have performed extensive simulation study using ns2 and the results show that the proposed HIMIPv6 outperforms FMIPv6 and HMIPv6. There is no packet loss and consequent service interruption caused by IP handover in HIMIP.