QoS-enabled group communication in integrated VANET-LTE heterogeneous wireless networks

Ubiquitous integration of high-speed WLANs with wide-range 3GPP systems results in the service extension of the backbone cellular network. This paper envisions such heterogeneous wireless network architecture by integrating IEEE 802.11p VANETs with 3GPP LTE to achieve seamless data connectivity for uninterrupted multimedia sessions amongst spatially-apart vehicular clusters. Issues on cluster head-based multicasting and QoS are explored in this paper. An adaptive multi-metric Cluster Head (CH) election mechanism is proposed to manage the VANET sub-clusters. In addition to this, construction of a 2-hop virtual overlay mesh-based shared multicast tree for lower-level multicasting within VANETs is discussed. Following this, the process of VANET-LTE upper-level communication is detailed, addressing the issues of CH and gateway handover, and resource allocation of the LTE eNB. The envisioned architecture enables the LTE to effectively schedule multimedia sessions based on the service requirements of the VANET gateways, thus satisfying QoS. Requisite simulation results are presented to evaluate the integrated network.