A Cooperative Diversity Based Handoff Management Scheme

Cooperative diversity has emerged as a promising technique to facilitate fast handoff mechanisms in mobile ad-hoc environments. The key concept behind a prominent cooperative diversity based protocol, namely, Partner-based Hierarchical Mobile IPv6 (PHMIPv6), is to enable mobile nodes anticipate handover events by selecting suitable partners to communicate on their behalves with Mobility Anchor Points (MAPs). In the original design of PHMIPv6, mobile hosts choose partners based on their signal strength. Such a naive selection procedure may lead to scenarios where mobile hosts lose communication with the selected partners before the completion of the handoff operations. In addition, PHMIPv6 overlooks security considerations, which can easily lead to vulnerable mobile hosts and/or partner entities. As a solution to these two shortcomings of PHMIPv6, this paper first proposes an extended version of PHMIPv6 called Connection Stability Aware PHMIPv6 (CSA-PHMIPv6). In CSA-PHMIPv6, mobile hosts select partners with whom communication can last for a sufficiently long time by employing the Link Expiration Time (LET) parameter. To tackle the security issues, the simple yet effective use of two distinct authentication keys is envisioned. Furthermore, to shorten the communication time between mobile hosts and their corresponding partners, a second handoff management approach called Partner Less Dependable PHMIPv6 (PLD-PHMIPv6) is proposed.