A preemptive dynamic bandwidth reallocation algorithm for group handover in IEEE 802.16j-enabled vehicular networks

Abstract

Current researches on vehicular networks usually assume one hop between roadside infrastructure such as a base station (BS) and a vehicle. Less research has concerned about a common scenario where there is another layer of nodes between a BS and a vehicle, i.e., a mobile relay station (MRS). This paper proposes to utilise IEEE 802.16j as an enabling technology, which supports multi-hop relaying services, to implement a vehicular network with particular focus on group handover (GHO), i.e., a group of MS is handed over to a new BS at the same time. A preemptive dynamic bandwidth reallocation algorithm that is able to borrow subchannels from other services is proposed for GHO. A Markov chain model is devised to evaluate the overall performance of the algorithm. The evaluation results have shown that the proposed algorithm leads to lower handover blocking probability and less latency than multiple single handovers.