The Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6) has a vital role in these heterogeneous environments for data traffic as well as for multimedia applications, providing a convergence layer for seamless mobility, Quality of Service and multicast. IPv6 already includes basic mobility support. However, in order to achieve fast, efficient and seamless mobility it is required that no packet loss is felt, no interruption or degradation should be noticed by the user or its corresponding nodes. With the growing number of wireless users, scalability is also an issue when designing new architectures since a large number of handovers may potentially occur at the same time.

In this work we present three proposed architectures, designed to achieve fast mobility and minimization of the real-time session degradation. The first proposal considers a fast mobility scheme enhanced from FMIPv6 extension used in the Daidalos IST Project (http://www.ist-daidalos.org), with mobile terminal and network initiated handover. The second proposal considers the previous enhanced FMIPv6 proposal with multicast supporting networks to enhance the handover efficiency. Finally, a novel mechanism is proposed that uses a supporting multicast network to guarantee an “always on” paradigm on fast moving mobile nodes.

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