High-speed infrastructure cellular network for vehicular users

To provide high speed connections for a large numbers of users in moving vehicles, a new broadband mobile network should be considered to go on the research to complement the lack of high data rate support from the existing 3G. Following this trend, authors introduce a design of a broadband microcellular network MM-MAN (mobile multimedia metropolitan area network) that can offer mobile users in a vehicle a smooth connection even during the handover of mobile users. MM-MAN uses the advantage of the polling mechanism in the MAC layer of wireless LAN to provide QoS support to vehicular users. To overcome the less support of high-speed mobility, we designed the parallel polling mechanism instead of contention-based. The parallel polling mechanism is handled to operate in the range of an LMC (logical macro cell) which is a multicast group of cells. Instead of wasting much time to contend for resources of a new BS (Base Station) during handover, the MT just responds the polling signal sent from this BS to connect to it. The polling response is controlled to multicast to all BSs of the same LMC via the core network to prepare for the next polling cycle. The terrestrial network of MM-MAN is suggested using the PON (passive optical network) because it is adoptable with parallel polling and LMC due to its large bandwidth and broadcast capabilities. Through analytical and simulation results, we show that the parallel polling scheme can achieve no handover latency, and maintain mobile users' throughput stably. At speeds of up to 250 km/h, the MT can still maintain its stable connection. OMNeT++ simulator is used to evaluate our proposal.