Fast and Secure Handoffs for V2I Communication in Smart City Wi-Fi Deployment

The Intelligent Transport System (ITS) is a vital part of smart city developments. Due to densely deployed access points and vehicular mobility in a smart city, the number of handovers also increases proportionately. Minimization of the handoff latency is crucial to provide a better quality of service for vehicles to have access different ITS services and applications. Increased handover latency can cause an interruption in vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I) communication. In this paper, we propose a fast and secure handoff mechanism for smart cities that have acceptable handoff latency for delay-sensitive ITS applications and services. Our proposal considers mobility and communication overhead to provide lower handoff latency. We compare our proposed mobility aware background scanning mechanism (AdBack) with standard Active Scanning mechanism in an emulated test bed. Our test results reveal that the proposed AdBack mechanism significantly outperforms the existing mechanisms in terms of handover latency, packet drop rates, and throughput. Experimental results show that amalgamation of AdBack and existing fast re-authentication (IEEE 802.11r) can improve connectivity for V2I communication in a smart city. We provide rigorous emulation results to justify the performance of our proposed scheme.