QA2: QoS-Guaranteed Access Assistance for Space–Air–Ground Internet of Vehicle Networks

Space–air–ground Internet of Vehicle networks is a promising network paradigm to support diverse vehicular services. Exploiting the unique advantages of spatial, aerial, and terrestrial network segments, the Quality of Service (QoS) of different services can be met by smart access network selection. However, the integrated network inevitably has to face many challenges, such as dynamic network topology, heterogeneous resources, and long propagation latency, which can seriously degrade the QoS performance. In order to provide QoS guarantee to vehicles, we propose a novel architecture, called QoS-guaranteed access assistance (QA2) serve vehicles with access assistance. To be specific, a virtualized layer is established in the network, which contains the logical resources of ground network infrastructures. Using that layer, Access Assistants are flexibly deployed at a dynamic set of ground infrastructures, and then help vehicles to acquire network services with satisfied QoS requirements. Furthermore, to accommodate temporal–spatial-varying network demands of vehicles, QA2 adopts a cost-effective deployment scheme, which updates the locations of Assistants based on the real-time traffic flow with the minimum operation cost. The evaluation results demonstrate the effectiveness of QA2, which increases request success rate by more than 50%. The results also prove that the cost-effective deployment scheme can efficiently adapt to the change of traffic flow and achieve a good balance between QoS guarantee and cost saving. The operation cost is saved by more than 25% and the QoS performance is improved by more than 22%.