Proper Handover between VANET and Cellular Network Improves Internet Access

There are currently several ways of wireless access to support vehicular communication, including vehicular ad-hoc networks (VANETs) and cellular networks (off-the-shelf 3G and LTE). It is necessary to make a seamless handover decision to guarantee quality of service (QoS) of communications for a vehicle moving in the regions covered by more than one access networks. In this paper, we provide a performance guaranteed optimized handover decision algorithm. With this algorithm, the communication of vehicles can handover through heterogeneous wireless access networks not only to reach overall load balance among all access points, but also to maximize the data rate of the whole networks as well as the vehicles' fairness. In addition, in the process of decision making, the data rate of handover vehicles are estimated. Simulations are performed to demonstrate the efficiency of the proposed algorithm.