Handover method for mobile broadcasting reception using hierarchical mobile IPv6

Integrated Services Digital Broadcasting - Terrestrial (ISDB-T) has improved the quality of mobile reception compared with analog broadcasting. However, the conventional methods have performance drawbacks that negatively affect the broadcasting area handover. For example, TV receivers detect the change of broadcasting area by the poor reception and must search for a high quality channel from among all UHF channels, which wastes a lot of time. In this paper, we propose a broadcasting area handover method using Hierarchical Mobile IPv6 (HMIPv6). In this method, the local network equipment of HMIPv6 periodically collect broadcasting receiving information (BRI) such as a channel, media, and receiving quality from MNs. The equipment then constructs a broadcasting receiving list (BRL) of the available areas from the BRI collected by MNs. In this paper, we describe an example in which a mobility anchor point (MAP) constructs a BRL for every access router (AR). The MAPs transmit the BRL to the MNs that make handover, which enables them to detect changes of the broadcasting area and ensure that viewers can watch TV with minimal channel searching times. Furthermore, in the proposed method, the viewers can continuously view the same media by searching the channel of the same media that they viewed in a previous AR's area.