An Energy-Efficient Proactive Handover Scheme for Vehicular Networks Based on Passive RSU Detection

Recently, the Vehicular Network (VN) has received a lot of attention from researchers around the world. By allowing wireless communication, VNs enable information exchange among vehicles, which in turn has allowed drivers to become more aware of their surrounding road conditions. Accordingly, road safety is improved. However, due to the fast speed and frequent changes of direction of vehicles, the network topology of VNs is transient in nature. Hence, achieving efficient data dissemination/content delivery is a critical issue in the VNs-environment. In this article, we will introduce a novel passive roadside unit (RSU) detection-based proactive (PRDP) handover scenario. Consequently, the overhead of the handover process can be reduced, and the probability of successfully established connections can be improved. More precisely, by taking advantage of the Doppler effects of the received beacon signal, the passive RSU detection (PRD) scheme is derived by the maximum likelihood estimation function. Then, in combination with the extended Kalman filter (EKF), the PRDP handover protocol is designed to improve the energy efficiency of the handover procedure in the VNs-environment. We conduct intensive simulations to verify the proposed RSU detection scheme, and the experimental results further evaluate the performance of the proposed energy-efficient proactive handover protocol.