A mobile internal vertical handover mechanism for distributed mobility management in VANETs

International audienceWith the rapid development of internet, new technologies and new domains of activities are increasingly created with an exponential pace. Therefore, network operators and service providers experience an astonishing demand in terms of network services’ performance. Vehicular Ad hoc Networks (VANETs), which have evolved to Internet of Vehicles (IoV), are one of these new technologies with high demand in connectivity. This is due to their two critical characteristics (their high mobility and their frequent dynamic topology changes), since they generate scattered networks. Therefore, a high network’s performance has become a critical issue for connected and autonomous vehicles deployment. This is due to the fact that VANETs need a high coverage density in order to work efficiently. In order to address this issue, the Heterogeneous Vehicular Networks (HVN) paradigm has appeared. It consists in a hybridization of the vehicular network (IEEE 802.11p) and the cellular networks (3G/LTE/4G). This makes the vertical handover to be one of the key technologies for the IoV deployment. In this paper, we propose a vertical handover mechanism, denoted Proxy MIPv6-based Mobile Internal Vertical Handover (PMIP-MIVH), which uses a logical interface and a Distributed PMIPv6 scheme in order to improve the handover performance and consequently the overall network’s performance. Numerical model analysis show that our proposed solution (PMIP-MIVH) performs well in terms of handover connection durations, handover latency and session continuity. Finally, we have evaluated our solution using the well known network simulator NS3. We conducted performance comparison with existing PMIP-based solutions in terms of Packet Delivery Ratio (PDR), End-to-end delay, jitter and throughput metrics. Simulation results also show that our solution outperforms the considered existing solutions and therefore validate the analytical results