Exploiting Resource Contention in Highly Mobile Environments and Its Application to Vehicular Ad-Hoc Networks

Abstract

As network resources are shared between many users, resource management must be a key part of any communication system as it is needed to provide seamless communication and to ensure that applications and servers receive their required Quality-of-Service. However, mobile environments also need to consider handover issues. Furthermore, in a highly mobile environment, traditional reactive approaches to handover are inadequate and thus proactive techniques have been investigated. Recent research in proactive handover techniques defined two key parameters: Time Before Handover (TBH) and Network Dwell Time (NDT) for a mobile node in any given networking topology. Using this approach, it is possible to enhance resource management in common networks using probabilistic mechanisms because it is possible to express contention for resources in terms of No Contention, Partial Contention, and Full Contention. This proactive approach is further enhanced by the use of a contention queue to detect contention between incoming requests and those waiting for service. This paper therefore presents a new methodology to support proactive resource allocation for future networks such as Vehicular Ad-Hoc Networks. The proposed approach has been applied to a vehicular testbed and results are presented that show that this approach can improve overall network performance in mobile heterogeneous environments.