An Efficient Movement-Based Handover Prediction Scheme for Hierarchical Mobile IPv6 in VANETs

Wireless mobile communication in vehicular networks is essential for the content delivery of road safety and infotainment services to drivers. However, the vehicles' high mobility and topology changes affect the performance of traditional mobility management protocols over VANETs. Therefore, an efficient mobility management solution that mitigates the challenges of vehicles' mobility is needed. In this paper, we present a predictive hierarchical handover protocol for mobile IP in vehicular networks. We combine the stochastic probability analysis of a hidden Markov model, and the vehicles' movement projection to predict the next handoff. We evaluate the performance of our protocol against different mobile handover protocols using the network simulator NS-2, and various mobility traces. Furthermore, we assess the impact of the different type of observations on the prediction model. Our results showed that our predictive module outperforms all other handover protocols in reducing the handover latency and packet loss.