An Enhanced NEMO Protocol for Efficiently Managing both Handoff Performance and Route Optimization in Mobile Networks

Abstract

Fast handoff in network mobility (NEMO) is very crucial for providing uninterrupted Internet services to the users in quickly moving vehicles. However, the NEMO basic support (NBS) protocol takes comparatively long time to complete the handoff process resulting in large number of packet drops. Also in NBS protocol all packets to/from the mobile router (MR) passes through its home agent (HA) resulting in high latency in data transfer. In this paper, we propose fast and route optimized NEMO (FRONEMO) to reduce the handoff latency and packet loss, and also to eliminate triangular routing problem experienced in NBS protocol. To reduce handoff latency and packet loss, the FRONEMO brings in the concept of IP pre-fetching and advance-registration to acquire care-of-address for the anticipated future cells. Additionally, FRONEMO uses a prefix delegation technique to perform route optimization using a small number of control packets. Numerical analysis shows that though FRONEMO supports higher vehicle speed than that in fast handover for MIPv6 (FMIPv6), it has significantly low handoff latency, low signaling overhead, lower packet loss and higher throughput. It also reduces overhead during route optimization process.