Vehicular Mobility Management Schemes for Balancing Loads among WMN Access Points

Wireless mesh networks (WMN) are poised to be a cost-effective platform for many municipal applications in public safety, business and entertainment. In this paper we study WMN-based content delivery within Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) applications. An example ITS application would be to deliver content used for vehicle route guidance in emergency evacuation situations. We study and present three different vehicular mobility management schemes and compare these to the standard IEEE 802.11 mobility management scheme. We evaluate the benefits of the proposed scheme using OMNET++ simulator. Our results show that using the proposed schemes reduces handoff latencies and improves the overall network throughput at lower and higher vehicle speeds. In addition, the proposed schemes result in even distribution of the load of delivering ITS content to vehicles.