Multihoming for uplink communications in vehicular networks

Abstract

Vehicular networks arose to support safety related applications and to improve the traffic flow in the roads; however, nowadays they are also used to provide Internet access and entertainment to the vehicles' users. Intrinsic characteristics of these networks are the constant mobility and high dynamics. Furthermore, being based on vehicles, the number of network nodes tends to increase in a fast pace. All these characteristics combined with the fact that a vehicle does not always have direct communication with the core network, turns crucial the use of all available technologies and networks in the range of a vehicle, including multi-hop communications. This paper proposes an uplink manager for vehicular networks that offers multihoming, traffic differentiation and load-balancing, taking into account context-information to increase the network performance. The proposed uplink manager provides simultaneous connectivity and traffic in multiple networks and technologies, and also enables the support of vehicles with single and multi-hop connections available simultaneously. To provide such functionalities, several extensions have been performed to the control messages used in the mobility protocol to carry useful information needed to perform the uplink manager decisions. The proposed uplink manager has been tested in real networks and with real equipments. The obtained results show that it fulfils all proposed requirements, both in terms of load-balancing and traffic differentiation, without incurring any performance drop in terms of packet losses or delay.