User-Centric Mobility Management Architecture for Vehicular Networks

Abstract

Vehicular Ad Hoc Network (VANET) is a subclass of Mobile Ad Hoc Networks that provides wireless communication among vehicles as well as between vehicles and roadside devices. Providing safety and user comfort for drivers and passengers is a promising goal of these networks. Some user applications need a connection to internet through gateways which are in the road side. This connection could generate an overhead of control messages and also the handover time among gateways can affect the performance of these applications. This paper proposes an architecture for intra- and inter-system management for virtual environments in vehicular networks, supporting user-driven applications. More specifically, we consider applications that depend on virtual environments which must be constantly updated, such as online gaming. To efficiently support these applications, the proposed architecture includes an extension of the 802.21 protocol to cope with the virtual environment updates. NS3 simulations were performed to evaluate the proposal over the proxy MIPv6 considering VANET and LTE networks as base stations. We observed that the proposed mechanism that extends the 802.21 protocol had a shorter handover time and lower packet loss when acting with the presented architecture.