A fast location-based handoff scheme for vehicular networks

IEEE 802.11 is an economical and efficient standard that has been applied to vehicular networks. The long handoff latency of the traditional handoff scheme for IEEE 802.11, however, becomes an important issue for seamless connections in vehicular environments, as more handoffs may be triggered due to higher mobility of vehicles. This paper presents a new fast location-based handoff scheme particularly designed for vehicular networks. With the position and direction of a vehicle and locations of its surrounding access points (APs), our algorithm can accurately predict the next AP that the vehicle may visit. Time spent on scanning APs in handoff procedures is therefore significantly saved. The AP selection scheme can also reduce the total number of handoffs by selecting APs on the vehicle´s advancing path. Finally, simulation results demonstrate that the proposed scheme attains low prediction error rates, low layer-2 handoff latency and the reduced number of unnecessary handoffs.