A Handover Scheme for Improving Throughput Using Vehicle’s Moving Path Information

Abstract

With the successful proliferation of smart phones, the demand for seamless and faster service in vehicular environment is increasing. Typical handover mechanisms in practice today may lead to unnecessary or late timing handovers, when they are directly applied to vehicular environment. In this paper, we propose a novel handover mechanism using a vehicle’s moving path information to reduce the number of handovers or to increase throughput. During scanning process, a mobile node (MN) estimates average distances from its neighbor base stations (BSs) for a certain time interval using the vehicle’s moving path information. The BS that has the shortest distance from the MN is selected as a target BS for possible handover, so that the number of handovers can be reduced along the path. We carried out performance evaluation with four different moving paths and six different topologies. Through extensive simulations, we show that the proposed scheme reduces the average number of handovers and increases the network throughput.

This research was supported by the KCC(Korea Communications Commission), Korea, under the R&D program supervised by the KCA (Korea Communications Agency) (KCA-2011-09913-04002).