IEEE 802.11 Wireless LAN (WLAN) has been enthusiastically adopted in business offices, homes, and other spaces, for both public and private wireless local network connection. The users would like to deploy Voice IP (VoIP) and Video Phone based on Mobile IPv6 Protocol over Wireless LAN network. However, the frequent change in the mobile node's location causes evident signaling overhead, handover latency and packet loss, which in turn leads to the service degradation of real time traffic in Mobile IPv6. In this paper, we propose a scheme based on Wireless LAN by adding a new component called Handover Control Function (HCF) in MIPv6, which records all APs's MAC address, backend ARs' address and network prefix of those AP's. By the means that all Mobile Nodes (MNs) report periodically all AP's MAC address and signal strength information to HCF which MN can probe, HCF decides whether or which AP MN shall associate with and notifies MN about the new AP/AR's information, meanwhile, a bi-cast mechanism shall be applied to further improve handover performance by reducing the packet loss during handover.

Abstract. Mobile IPv6 permits the Mobile Node (MN) to maintain the continuous connectivity to the Internet when it moves from one access router to another. Due to both link switching delay and IPv6 protocol operation during the handover process, packets destined to the MN can be delayed or lost. This paper proposes a solution to improve the Mobile IPv6 handover performance over wireless network by introducing a new entity -Extension Handover Control Function (E-HCF). E-HCF could send the decisive control message to MN to accelerate the handover process and manage the traffic belonging to MN to reduce the packet loss. With a comparison between Mobile IPv6 and our E-HCF solution, we show that our solution allows us providing low-latency and low packet loss for real-time services during the handover.