In order to improve the performance of real time services in the mobile environment, the hierarchical approach was proposed to reduce the frequency of handoffs in the mobile IPv6 environment. The mobility anchor point (MAP) is adopted in a hierarchical manner to handle the location management of the mobile node within the MAP domain. An enhanced speed estimation scheme is provided in this paper to select the appropriate MAP so that the overhead of handoff can be minimized. Furthermore, the concept of abstract MAP (AMAP) node is proposed to extend the coverage domain of MAP. In addition to selecting a MAP with respect to the speed estimation of the mobile node in a heuristic way, the criteria of load balance is also investigated in this study. The performance of the proposed scheme is examined through exhaustive simulations. And the simulation results show that the proposed scheme can effectively achieve the above objectives.
