A Cross Layer Fast Handover Scheme in VANET

This study presents a cross-layer fast handover scheme for VANET, called vehicular fast handover scheme (VFHS), where the physical layer information is shared with the MAC layer, to reduce the handover delay. The key idea of VFHS is to utilize oncoming side vehicles (OSVs) to collect physical and MAC layers information of passing through RVs and broadcast the information to vehicles that are temporarily disconnected, referred to as broken vehicles (BVs). A BV can thus perform a rapid handover when it enters the transmission range of the approaching RVs. The effectiveness of VFHS is verified using ns2 simulations. Simulation results indicate that VFHS significantly decreases handover latency and packet loss.