Inter-domain handover scheme using an intermediate mobile access gateway for seamless service in vehicular networks

Current IP-level mobility management protocols are unable to satisfy the stringent handover latency requirements for supporting real-time multimedia services between different domains in a high-speed vehicular environment. This paper proposes an inter-domain handover scheme for Proxy Mobile IPv6 (PMIPv6) with a new network entity, called intermediate-mobile access gateway (iMAG). The iMAG is located between the home and the foreign domains and is connected to both domains. The proposed scheme is a proactive handover approach that performs the inter-domain L3 handover in advance before the inter-domain L2 handover while the Mobile Node (MN) is still connected to the iMAG in the home domain. Therefore, the proposed scheme enables the inter-domain handover latency to reduce as low as the intra-domain handover latency. Numerical analysis and simulation results demonstrate that the proposed scheme is able to support seamless service continuity in inter-domain handovers. Copyright (C) 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.