A Novel Proactive Handover Scheme for Achieving Energy-Efficient Vehicular Networks

Abstract

Recently, the Vehicular Network (VN) has gained a lot of attention from researchers around the world. By allowing wireless communication, VNs enable information exchanging among vehicles, which in turn let drivers become more aware of their surrounding road conditions. Accordingly, the road safety is improved. However, due to the fast speed and high-frequent changing direction of vehicles, the network topology of VNs has the transient nature. Hence, achieving efficient data dissemination/content delivery is a critical issue in the VNs-environment. In this article, we will introduce a novel passive roadside unit (RSU) detection-based proactive (PRDP) handover scenario. Consequently, the overhead of the handover process can be reduced, and the probability of successful connection establishment can be improved. More precisely, by combining with the extended Kalman filter (EKF), the PRDP handover protocol is designed to improve the energy efficiency of the handover procedure in the VNs-environment. We carry out intensive simulations to evaluate the performance of the proposed energy-efficient proactive handover protocol.