The Fast Handover Research Of WiMAX Network

As Internet and mobile communication develop rapidly, people propose some advanced requirements on the QoS of multi-media service . Mobile communication must support broader band, and broadband access technology must support mobility. But nowadays wireless systems, such as 3G, WLAN, have some defects in respect of speed, cost, range and mobility. So the WiMAX which is a mobile broadband wireless access standard has got more and more attention.WiMAX/802.16e standard not only meets people's high-speed, long-distance and wireless needs in the last kilometer connection, but also provides sufficient mobility capacity. Because of its outstanding system performance, WiMAX technology will be applied in a wide area and will have a bright market prospect. But current 802.16e standard only specifies the mobility of MAC layer. How to execute the vertical handover associated with both the MAC and IP layers is an urgent problem which may affect the deployment of WiMAX network.In order to provide the session continuity during handover between different subnets, Mobile IPv6 protocol is presented. However, the handover latency resulting from standard Mobile IPv6 is often unacceptable to real-time traffic such as Voice over IP. So the Mobile IPv6 Fast Handover protocol (FMIPv6) has been proposed as a mechanism to improve the handover latency.In this paper, IEEE802.16e standard is described at first. Then an introduction for the basic knowledge and research in MIPv6 and FMIPv6 protocol is given. A fast handover scheme of WiMAX network which based on FMIPv6 protocol is suggested, which implements the fast handover at IP layer associating with MAC layer at the same time. This scheme minimizes handover latency by predicting and preparing the impending handover in advance. Finally, simulation are carried out to evaluate the performance of this fast handover scheme. The result of the simulation shows that the fast handover scheme has good performance.