Utility-based horizontal handover decision method for vehicle-to-vehicle communication in VANET

Vehicular ad hoc network (VANET) is the emerging wireless communication technology in vehicular domain to support the safety and non-safety purposes in transportation. Despite the potential implementation of VANET, some challenges mainly due to the dynamic environment need to be addressed and tackled. In this paper, the horizontal handover especially in vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) connection is investigated. The dominant handover decision method in wireless network, namely received signal strength (RSS) based method, is actually inappropriate for the implementation in V2V VANET. Therefore, a utility based handover decision method is proposed in this paper. The utility function is formulated based on the value of signal to noise ratio (SNR) and the load of network. Despite the fluctuation of SNR, the proposed method can make the better handover decision i.e. by reducing the ping pong effect and improving the throughput by selecting the network with lower load. In this research, the proposed method is evaluated through simulations. The results of simulations show that the proposed method can improve the performance of V2V handover in terms of throughput and handover rate compared with the RSS based method. © 2020 Intelligent Network and Systems Society.