When mobile node (MN) moves away from the original domain, it initiates a handover procedure to connect with a new network. The fast handover scheme offers a handover preparation mechanism for MN in order to reduce the handover latency. However, the current fast handover schemes mainly deal with the situation of one MN instead of multiple MNs. In the wireless network, it may exist a situation in which a group of MNs moves from the same previous network to the next network. For example, a group of people are walking from the street to the same department store. In this scenario, multiple MNs start the same handover preparation procedures and generate many duplicate control messages in the network. In this paper, a group-based fast handover (GB-FH) control scheme is proposed to resolve the aforementioned problem. In the proposed GB-FH control scheme, one MN initiates a handover preparation and other neighboring MNs can join the handover preparation using the “hitch-and-ride” concept. Through the use of the shared invokation of the handover preparation procedure, (1) the handover preparation delay and handover processing delay can be reduced, (2) bandwidth consumption can be reduced and (3) the contention of wireless channel for multiple MNs can be improved due to the use of fewer control messages. As a result, the handover performance can be improved.

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