End-to-end QoS-aware handover in fast handovers for mobile IPv6 with DiffServ using IEEE802.11e/IEEE802.11k

In this paper, we propose a mechanism to provide a fine-grained end-to-end QoS guarantee for a mobile node handover in wireless environment. Other than selecting an access point to re-associate, we also consider the QoS status of the upper-link access router. We use information from IEEE 802.11e to obtain the current load of each access point, and information from IEEE 802.11k packets to obtain a list of neighbor access points to reduce latency in scanning process. For the network-layer QoS, we assume the Differentiated Service (DiffServ) functions on each access router. In order to reduce packet loss and latency in the network-layer handover, we consider the Fast Handovers for Mobile IPv6. We proposed a modification in router advertisement message to include DiffServ status of each AR. The mobile node in our proposed model then calculates scores of each access point and selects a new access point that has the maximum scores based on both the network-layer status and the link-layer traffic load.