A Dynamic MAP Discovery and Selection Scheme for Predictive Hierarchical MIPv6 in Vehicular Networks

Recent developments and the ubiquitous availability of wireless technologies and inter-vehicle communication systems are anticipated to lead to the evolution of heterogeneous wireless networks. Based on standards such as the IEEE 802.11, 5G and WiMax, coupled with mobile IP for the content delivery of road safety and infotainment services to drivers over the new generation of vehicular networks. However, the performance of traditional mobility management protocols over vehicular networks is affected by network topology changes and vehicles' high mobility. Therefore, efficient mobility management solution that mitigates the challenges of vehicles' mobility is needed. In this paper, we present an adaptive mobility management protocol for predictive hierarchical mobile IPv6 in vehicular networks. We develop a dynamic Mobility Anchor Point (MAP) discovery and selection scheme that adjusts the network topology structure to fit the vehicles' mobility environment better. Moreover, the predictive handover scheme is based on a multi-observation hidden Markov model, which utilizes the vehicles' movement projections to estimate the subsequent point of access. The performance of our proposed protocol has been tested using NS-2 and several real and synthetic mobility traces. The results indicate that our protocol exhibits better performance results when compared to well-known handover protocols in reducing the handover latency and packet loss.