The University of British Columbia

Handover management is one of the most critical issues that mobility management protocols are concerned with. This process becomes even more critical in the case of micro-mobility where the mobile node is expected to encounter frequent handovers. We use the only mobility management protocol that has been standardized by the IETF, namely mobile IP, to identify bottlenecks in the handover process and to determine which of the various micro-mobility management protocols address these bottlenecks. This is achieved by providing detailed delay measurements of the handover process for mobile IPv6 using an OPNET reg; simulation environment. Our results show that the main bottleneck in the handover process is move detection. Further, we show that the only micro-mobility protocol that addresses this bottleneck without suffering from scalability issues is not compatible with mobile IPv6 and, as a result, does not benefit from its many improvements. We conclude that a more appropriate solution would be to use of mobile IPv6 with the addition of move detection optimizations.