Performance evaluation of spectrum mobility in multi-homed mobile IPv6 cognitive radio cellular networks

Technological developments alongside VLSI achievements enable mobile devices to be equipped with multiple radio interfaces which is known as multihoming. On the other hand, the combination of various wireless access technologies, known as Next Generation Wireless Networks (NGWNs) has been introduced to provide continuous connection to mobile devices in any time and location. Cognitive radio networks as a part of NGWNs aroused to overcome spectrum inefficiency and spectrum scarcity issues. In order to provide seamless and ubiquitous connection across heterogeneous wireless access networks in the context of cognitive radio networks, utilizing Mobile IPv6 is beneficial. In this paper, a mobile device equipped with two radio interfaces is considered in order to evaluate performance of spectrum handover in terms of handover latency. The analytical results show that the proposed model can achieve better performance compared to other related mobility management protocols mainly in terms of handover latency.

I. Introduction

Recent innovations in wireless networking systems and communication technologies, allow mobile devices to be equipped with multiple radio interfaces; which are called multi-homed mobile devices, and maintain their connections while moving across various wireless access technologies. The integration of heterogeneous wireless access technologies have led to the trend toward Next Generation Wireless Networks (NGWN). Multi-homing deployed in NGWN has many advantages like: resilience, load balancing and ubiquitous access support [1]. One of the main concerns in NGWN is providing seamless and ubiquitous connections to mobile devices while their point of attachment to the network changes. Mobile IPv6 as a solution toward mobility management in NGWN has been introduced to allow a Mobile Node (MN) to maintain its connection to the network regardless of its location [2]. Handover is the process by which a MN keeps its connection active while moving across one point of attachment to another. During this process, the MN cannot send or receive any data packets because of link and network layers operations delay. Vertical handover issues have been studied in the literature [3]–[5]. To decrease handoff latency some extensions of MIPv6 such as Hierarchical Mobile IPv6 (HMIPv6), Fast handover for Mobile IPv6 (FMIPv6), Fast handover for Hierarchical Mobile IPv6 (FHMIPv6) and Proxy Mobile IPv6 (PMIPv6) have been proposed by Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) [6]–[10].