Enhancing Vehicular Applications by Exploiting Network Diversity

In this work we introduce a new model for exploiting network diversity in vehicular environments, which integrates ad-hoc communications with the existing cellular infrastructure aiming to meet the diverse communication requirements of vehicular applications. Although there are a plethora of reported studies on either 802.11p Digital Short Range Communications (DSRC) or cellular networks, joint research of these two areas mostly focuses on the offloading aspect when the two networks are available. This work presents current advances in the design of a novel framework aimed at enhancing the performance of applications deployed over a heterogeneous vehicular environment. We introduce and evaluate a decision system that exploits, simultaneously, the advantages of each individual network.