Enhanced fast handovers for PMIPv6 in vehicular environments

In modern wireless networking technologies, the need to support the nodes mobility is growing rapidly. This need is even greater in vehicular environments, in which the nodes are characterized by high mobility. In this paper, we study the basic protocols for mobility support in vehicular environments, such as Fast Handovers for Proxy Mobile IPv6 (PMIPv6) and Transient Binding for PMIPv6, and analyze the handover delay and their performance. Moreover, we present vehicular environment scenarios in which the current protocols fail to provide seamless handovers for the mobile nodes, due to long delays and large percentages of packet loss. Additionally, we propose an enhanced handover scheme for Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks (VANETs), in which data follow the optimal path to the destination and is characterized by a smooth transition of the mobile node to the target access network. Finally, by evaluating the performance of the proposed scheme a significant decrease of the total handover delay compared with the one of reactive and predictive handovers of FPMIP, as well as, in false prediction scenarios of the target access network is observed.