Optimizing Unsatisfactory Handover Trigger in Heterogeneous Vehicular Networks

In heterogeneous vehicular networks, the communications among moving vehicles (MV) and between vehicles and the roadside infrastructures have posed a challenge for providing continuous mobility services. FMIPv6 looking toward the support of a timely and precise link layer (L2) trigger provides a fundamental mobility management approach. The time stamp of L2 trigger hence is crucial for guaranteeing the handover performance but is difficult to be obtained in the practical application scenarios. The unsatisfactory handover trigger includes the late L2 trigger and the premature L2 trigger. The former would cause a missed detection deteriorating the perceived quality of service, and the latter would cause a false alarm with serious performance loss and resources waste. To address this issue, we propose a solution to optimize the unsatisfactory handover trigger (O-UHT), including promptly determining the unsatisfactory handover trigger and elaborately developing the specific measures to reduce the performance loss caused by the above two cases. The simulations conducted on NS-2 platform have verified the efficiency.