Navigation-aware association control in vehicular wireless networks

Currently, internetworking over Wireless Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks (VANET) is getting more attention and discussion. Mobile devices, including smartphones, laptops and PDAs, associate with nearby access points that are located on the roadside to access Internet in VANETs. Hence, people can use these devices to communicate in VANETs. However, the unbalanced traffic distribution often occurs among the APs in the networks, which leads to unfair bandwidth share for each user. This situation may get worse in VANETs composed of thousands of high mobility vehicles. Hence, this study focuses on association control to achieve load balancing among APs (RSUs), and we propose a novel association control algorithm with an aid of the navigation system. Based on the use of fully-fledged navigation system, our proposed algorithm plans a RSU-association-schedule, which selects a series of appropriate RSUs (roadside units) in advance to reach destination and meanwhile achieves load balancing among RSUs. The simulation results show that our scheme does improve the fairness and overall performance in VANETs.