A Novel Network Mobility Management Scheme for Vehicular Networks

In recent years, vehicular networks have been widely studied because these networks become an important part of wireless metropolitan networks. This type of wireless network is different from other conventional wireless mobile networks since the mobile nodes in the networks usually have high speed, sufficient power and dynamic topology. In vehicular networks, vehicles can connect with access points, which are deployed on the roadside, to communicate with their correspondent nodes through Internet. However, the radio range of antennas which are installed in vehicles and access points are limited. As a result, to maintain connections during the trips, vehicles have to switch their access points frequently. The question of how to design an efficient mobility management solution for vehicular networks is still very important in such mobile environment. In this paper, a novel mobility management scheme for vehicular networks is proposed. Network mobility solution is adopted for vehicular networks and intra-cluster communications are used to improve the quality of the mobility.