Cooperation-Assisted Spectrum Handover Mechanism in Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks

This paper proposes a cooperation-assisted spectrum handover (CASH) scheme in vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs). In CASH, each vehicle uses cognitive radio technology to collect the surrounding spectrum information, computes the stability of the spectrum, exchanges neighbor information by vehicle-to-vehicle collaboration technology, and then executes a partial prescan mechanism to reduce the handover delay. The proposed method can improve the spectrum utilization, shorten the delay time of the spectrum handover, and reduce the total number of handovers. Finally, the simulation results show that the proposed method outperforms other existing schemes. In spectrum utilization, CASH is about 20% better than that of the traditional full scan method. In average scan time, the time of CASH is about 5 times less than the time of the traditional full scan method. In total number of handovers, CASH improves the performance of the full scan scheme by 33%.