Enhanced mobility management scheme for next generation 5G vehicular environments

Mobility management is a key function of modern wireless networks. Specifically, in vehicular environments which are characterized by high mobility, networks must be able to provide a stable, uninterrupted connection to the vehicles to guarantee the continuity of their services. In this paper, the Proxy Mobile IPv6 (PMIPv6) as well as its enhanced schemes suggested by the research literature are studied, while at the same time the architecture of the 5G Core (5GC) network is described. Subsequently, a novel handover (HO) scheme is proposed for supporting Vehicle to Infrastructure (V2I) communications. The proposed scheme is based on the Fast Proxy Mobile IPv6 (FPMIPv6) protocol using the functionalities of the 5GC network and applies signaling enhancements and transient binding to improve the route of data packets to the mobile node (MN), aiming at the optimization of both Predictive and Reactive HOs. Evaluation results shows that the proposed scheme outperforms the FMIPv6 protocol in terms of HO delay, HO cost and packet loss.