Abstract
This paper addresses the Proxy Mobile IPv6 (PMIP) handover using bicasting in mobile/wireless networks. The bicasting scheme can be used to support the PMIP handover, which tends to waste the network resources of wireless links and incurs data losses during handover. We propose an enhanced scheme of PMIP handover, called the partial bicasting with buffering for PMIP (PBB-PMIP). In the PBB-PMIP handover, the bicasting is performed in the "partial" region between the Local Mobility Anchor (LMA) and the Mobile Access Gateway (MAG), when a mobile node is in the handover area. The data packets are buffered at the new MAG during handover to reduce data losses and are then forwarded to mobile nodes after handover. By ns-2 simulations, the proposed PBB-PMIP scheme is compared with the existing schemes of PMIP and PMIP with bicasting. The proposed scheme can benefit from the reduction of handover delay and packet loss, and the effective use of the network resources of wireless links, as compared to the existing handover schemes.