TCP and UDP Performance Measurements in Presence of Fast Handovers in An IPv6-based Mobility Environment

Within the framework of the IST project Moby Dick an IPv6-based, mobility-enabled and security aware architecture, including Quality of Service mechanism, is defined and implemented. This paper, based on re-sults originated in the mobility evaluation of the project, analyses in detail the effects of Fast Handovers on the performance of TCP connections and real-time UDP data streams. Based on our optimised Linux kernel implementation, we present quantitative results on the benefits of the Fast Handover support for Mobile IPv6 i) in an integrated architecture comprising end-to-end Quality of Service and appropriate AAA mechanisms and ii) inde-pendent of the deployed access technology. The analysis for Wireless LAN (i.e., IEEE 802.11b) intra-technology handover shows handover interruption times below 1ms and interruptionless Ethernet to/from Wireless LAN inter-technology handover. Finally, our results show the impact of the delay introduced by Quality of Service and AAA on the overall handover completion time