Fast Layer-3 Handover in Vehicular Networks

Vehicular communication is of great importance for safety and entertainment purposes. Vehicles are required to share different types of data with other vehicles on the road. For this, vehicles require either communicating directly with each other or are connected to a wireless communication-based access points on the road side. These wireless access points support short to medium range wireless communication protocol 802.11p. Vehicles are required to be associated with these wireless access points for exchange of information. When vehicles move, they change their point of attachment from one wireless access point to another wireless access point. This causes interruption in the data flow which increases further when vehicles require a new IP address of that network. In this book, we give an overview of standard handover methods with their enhancements and propose a fast handover scheme for layer 3 communication stack. Based on the assumption that vehicles know their route in advance, we enhance the handover process and improve seamless connectivity. We also discuss different issues which are causes of delay that how they can be overcome in our proposed solution.