Access and resources reservation in 4G-VANETs for multimedia applications

Abstract

The development of Vehicular Ad-hoc Networks (VANET) has witnessed the release of various multimedia services and made it important to develop architectures and routing protocols capable of (a) handling the multimedia QoSs requirements and the real-time services’ constraints; (b) maximizing the network coverage; and (c) managing resources on the Road Side Units (RSUs), in order to guarantee the continuous delivery of real-time services. In this work, we provide a novel 4G-based VANET heterogeneous architecture, which integrates IEEE 802.11p and 3GPP LTE access networks, to provide access to multimedia services. A tree-based network access scheme is developed, providing a rapid connection and handover to highly mobility vehicles, and allowing to maximize at a large extent the network coverage beyond the area uncovered by RSUs (in the form of LTE eNodeBs). Techniques for the proactive resources provision on the RSUs, and the management of QoS-aware vertical and horizontal handovers, are developed.