General IP based mobility mechanisms in heterogeneous system fix/mobile

Today, mobile users are facing the fact that many heterogeneous radio access technologies coexist, ranging from wireless LANs to cellular systems. No technology has emerged as common and universal solution. On the other hand, the Internet Protocol becomes the universal network layer over wireline networks. Moreover it can be used on the top of all wireless radio technologies, which makes the current trends today toward the design of All-IP wireless and wireline networks, where radio cells are under the control of IP access routers for signaling and data transmission. General mobility mechanisms are introduced in Internet Protocol to manage internet-network node movement, regardless of wireless technologies heterogeneity. Mobile IP has long been considered as the facto standard in providing handover and mobility management in internet protocol. However, as the demand of wireless mobile devices capable of executing real times applications increases, it has necessitated to extend mobile IP with better handover techniques to minimize session disruption. That includes providing a new handover technique which cause reduced data loss, minimize additional end-to-end data transmission delays and improve end-to-end services. In this dissertation we first examine, evaluate and analyze existing IP-based handover management approaches. We will identify the causes behind each handover performance and therefore device a set of guidelines for the development of new IP-based handover mechanisms. We propose then, a set of mechanisms to handle soft handover in IPv6 protocol. This approach coexists with mobile IPv6, extends-it with mobile node multihoming management, bidirectional asynchronous IPv6-flows duplication and merging and, in certain case, improves the overall Quality of wireless connection. The performance of soft handover is evaluated through a home-made simulator and compared with the performance of basic Mobile IPv6 and fast handover bicasting. Finally, in order to validate this approach, the dissertation describes the design and the implementation of a multi-interfaces mobile node prototype and a mobile IPv6 soft handover testbed. The results of experiences measurements on real time traffics are discussed in the last chapter.