MROAD: Scanning-free model-based roaming for 802.11 networks under vehicular mobility

The recent proliferation of metro-scale IEEE 802.11 networks represents a great opportunity to improve Vehicular-to-Infrastructure (V2I) communications. Nevertheless, while these short range networks provide high throughput, vehicular mobility forces frequent handovers between different access points that significantly impact user connectivity. In this paper we present MROAD, a model-based roaming decision technique that reduces the impact of handover on user connectivity. This is achieved by avoiding the costly scanning phase and predicting the optimal handover location to maximize its success. We perform an evaluation study of MROAD over a commercial IEEE 802.11 network deployed in Luxembourg city in order to find the roaming strategy providing the best connectivity under vehicular mobility.