Mobility management for efficient data delivery in infrastructure-to-vehicle networks

Efficient and reliable communication between base stations and vehicles is becoming increasingly important for meeting the demands of many intelligent transportation applications. The key challenge here is to deal with constant topological changes in the underlying communication network resulting from vehicular mobility. In this paper, we propose a mobility management scheme MMDD that helps base stations track the location of vehicles registered to their services. Registered vehicles send their location updates to corresponding base stations by following either a distance-based or a time-based mechanism. The location information is subsequently leveraged in transmitting data packets in an efficient and reliable manner. We also propose a paging mechanism through which base stations can obtain the latest location information of any registered vehicle. Through a detailed simulation study, we demonstrate that our location management scheme outperforms a state-of-the-art approach RLSMP, both in terms of average packet delay and success percentage. We also show that the impact of control packets from location update and paging mechanisms on the overall performance is minimal. 2012 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.