This paper presents an overview of IPv6-based mobility management protocols: mobile IPv6 (MIPv6), fast handovers for mobile IPv6 (FMIPv6), hierarchical mobile IPv6 (HMIPv6), and fast handover for hierarchical mobile IPv6 (F-HMIPv6). All these protocols play an important role in the next generation wireless networks, because in such networks, mobile users need to be freely change their access network or domain with on-going real-time multimedia services. The mobility management procedure for

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... protocol is described in details. Furthermore, handover performance is compared for host-based mobility protocols using analytical modeling. The effect of various wireless network parameters on the performance is studied carefully. Numerical analysis shows that handoff performance in wireless networks is largely dependent on various system parameters such as the user velocity, subnet radius, and session-to-mobility ratio, domain size and binding lifetime; there is a trade-off between performance metrics and such parameters.