Handover in ieee 802.11p-based delay-sensitive vehicle-to-infrastructure communication,” Research Report IDE-0924

Based on communication and cooperation between vehicles and roadside infrastructure, Intelligent Transport Systems (ITS) safety applications offer great potential to avoid traffic accidents or at least reduce their impact. As these applications usually are delay-sensitive, the delay introduced by waiting for access to the wireless communication channel should both be reduced and provided with an upper bound. The proposed IEEE 802.11p standard for short to medium range vehicular communication does not offer these guarantees. In previous work, we presented a MAC (Medium Access Control) enhancement supporting delay-sensitive, safety-critical V2I (Vehicle-to-Infrastructure) applications. Since the proposed enhancement requires a deterministic and fast mechanism to associate a vehicle to a roadside unit (RSU) so that it can be integrated into the centralized polling schedule, we now target the handover and connection setup between a vehicle and an RSU. Although the first connection setup with an RSU still underlies the randomness of the original 802.11p MAC method, we provide a deterministic solution to further enhance the handover procedures by introducing a fast, proactive handover mechanism. We show that the overhead of our solution is limited and still allows our MAC protocol to support safety-critical V2I applications in a densely trafficked highway scenario