On modeling speed-based vertical handovers in vehicular networks: “Dad, slow down, I am watching the movie”

Although vehicular ad hoc networks are emerging as a novel paradigm for safety services, supporting real-time applications (e.g., video-streaming, Internet browsing, online gaming, etc.) while maintaining ubiquitous connectivity remains a challenge due to both high vehicle speed, and non-homogeneous nature of the network access infrastructure. To guarantee acceptable Quality-of-Service levels and to support seamless connectivity, vertical handovers across different access networks are performed. In this work we prove the counterintuitive result that in vehicular environments, even if a candidate network has significantly higher bandwidth, it is not always beneficial to abandon the serving network. To this end, we introduce an analytical model for a vertical handover algorithm based on vehicle speed. We argue that the proposed approach may help providers incentivize safety by forcing vehicular speed reduction to guarantee acceptable Quality-of-Service for real-time applications.