Reliability-based server selection for heterogeneous VANETs

Heterogeneous wireless networks are capable of providing customers with better services while service providers can offer more applications to more customers with lower costs. To provide services, some applications rely on existing servers in the network. In a vehicular ad-hoc network (VANET) some mobile nodes may function as servers. Due to high mobility of nodes and short lifetime of links, server-to-client and server-to-server communications become challenging. In this paper we propose to enhance the performance of server selection by taking link reliability into consideration in the server selection mechanism, thereby avoiding extra client-to-server hand-offs and reducing the need of server-to-server synchronization. As a case study we focus on location management service in a heterogeneous VANET. We provide a routing algorithm for transactions between location servers and mobile nodes. We assume that location servers are vehicles equipped with at least one long- range and one short-range radio interfaces, whereas regular nodes (clients) are only equipped with a short-range radio interface. The primary goal of our design is to minimize hand-offs between location servers while limiting the delays of location updates. Taking advantage of vehicle mobility patterns, we propose a mobility-aware server selection scheme and show that it can reduce the number of hand-offs and yet avoid large delays during location updates. We present simulation results to show that proposed scheme significantly lowers the costs of signaling and rate of server hand-offs by increasing the connection lifetimes between clients and servers.