Characterization and Abatement of the Reassociation Overhead in Vehicle to Roadside Networks

Mobility in vehicular networks naturally leads frequent handoffs and reassociations between the vehicles and roadside access points. The overhead due to these reassociation comes in the form of the bandwidth and delays associated with the handoff related packets that are exchanged between a vehicles and the access point. This paper derives an information theoretic lower bound on the Medium Access Control (MAC) layer overhead associated with reassociations caused due to node mobility. An efficient MAC protocol is then proposed that reduces the handoff delays. Simulations are used to demonstrate the superior performance of the proposed protocol in terms of the throughput and packet latency.