A seamless flow mobility management architecture for vehicular communication networks

Vehicular ad-hoc networks (VANETs) are self-organizing, self-healing networks which provide wireless communication among vehicular and roadside devices. Applications in such networks can take advantage of the use of simultaneous connections, thereby maximizing the throughput and lowering latency. In order to take advantage of all radio interfaces of the vehicle and to provide good quality of service for vehicular applications, we developed a seamless flow mobility management architecture based on vehicular network application classes with network-based mobility management. Our goal is to minimize the time of flow connection exchange in order to comply with the minimum requirements of vehicular application classes, as well as to maximize their throughput. Network simulator (NS-3) simulations were performed to analyse the behaviour of our architecture by comparing it with other three scenarios. As a result of this work, we observed that the proposed architecture presented a low handover time, with lower packet loss and lower delay.