Modelling and Analysis of a Novel Vehicular Mobility Management Scheme to Enhance Connectivity in Vehicular Environments

Robust end-to-end connectivity in vehicular environments has been a daunting problem standing in the way of the development and provisioning of novel in-transit data communication services envisioned to incur remarkable enhancements on all of the: a) road safety, b) environment and c) welfare of travelling passengers. The establishment of continuous multi-hop data communication paths among arbitrary pairs of vehicular nodes is severely affected by the natural vehicular traffic flow's inherent limitations and obstacles that have been widely investigated in the literature. This present work proposes a novel Vehicular Mobility Management (VMM) scheme that has the objective of regulating the vehicles' navigational parameters in such a way to steadily line these vehicles up in proximity of each other with space headways that do not exceed the coverage range of their respective OnBoard Units. This will allow for establishing robust and long-lived communication links connecting the vehicles together; hence, increasing the probability of existence of multi-hop paths between arbitrary pairs of vehicular nodes. A Mathematical model is formulated herein in order to evaluate the performance of VMM in terms of multiple Quality-of-Service (QoS) metrics (e.g. average end-to-end data delivery delay, average throughput, probability of existence of an end-to-end path, etc). A simulation framework is then established for the purpose of verifying the correctness and validity of the proposed model and gauge the merit and advantages of the proposed VMM scheme. The reported results constitute a tangible proof of the validity of the proposed model as well as of the benefits emanating from vehicular flow control in the context of a highly promising step towards the realization of the embraced Internet of Vehicles (IoV).