Abstract:

Providing high quality Internet services in public buses allows the bus passengers to entertain themselves and even to work remotely during their travel time, thus significantly improving their quality of life. This paper focuses on the handoff mechanisms for bus networks. Firstly, a data transmission rate based handoff trigger is proposed based on an improved bus network structure. The trigger can be fired for a handoff accurately with low cost and high communication stability. Further, an adaptive handoff mechanism called  MHandoff is studied for the scenario in which there exist multiple APs (Access Points) in a bus station. The mechanism aims to guarantee load balancing in all APs to execute AP selection and also can achieve high average bus throughput for each associated bus. Through simulation experiments, the above mechanisms can improve system performance more greatly and support bus communication better than the traditional methods.

Key words: vehicular networks；bus networks；handoff trigger；handoff mechanism