Network mobility for vehicular networks

Vehicular networks, which have been initially designed to support safety applications, are now also envisaged as a way to provide internet access to its users while in the vehicles. Due to the high mobility of the vehicles and of the network formed by the vehicles, a significant number of handovers of the vehicles between road side units will be in place. We have designed and implemented a seamless network handover mechanism that is able to move a network of vehicles between different infrastructure units, even in connections with a different number of vehicles to the infrastructure. This mobility approach is also integrated in a connection manager that provides seamless communication between vehicles and/or the infrastructure, electing the best technology and network to maintain the vehicle connected without breaking any active sessions of the users. To validate and evaluate the proposed handover approach, two real-world vehicular testbeds were developed, both combining two technologies: WAVE/IEEE 802.11p and IEEE 802.11g. The results of handovers performed on various road scenarios show that the proposed mobility approach provides transparent mobility for both vehicles and passengers, even in mobility between networks with a different number of vehicles to the infrastructure.