COOPERATIVE MULTICRITERIA HANDOVER MANAGEMENT FOR RELIABLE V2I COMMUNICATION AND IMPROVED QoS IN OVERLAYED HETEROGENEOUS NETWORK ENVIRONMENT.

Providing uninterrupted wireless connectivity to vehicles has posed a significant challenge in the context of Vehicle–to–Infrastructure (V2I) communications especially in heterogeneous network environments. This limitation primarily arises due to the constrained infrastructure of vehicular networks. Solutions like Wireless Access for Vehicular Environment (WAVE) protocol and On–Board Units (OBUs) have aimed to expand network capacity and enhance communication between vehicles and infrastructure. However, significant network resources are spent on selecting appropriate target networks during handover in heterogeneous networks. To address issues like incorrect handover network selection and handover delays, researchers have proposed various multi–criteria decision making (MCDM) techniques to choose the optimal candidate cell within HetNet environment. Nevertheless, a majority of these solutions do not account for variations in criteria weights during handoff decisions, which impacts the efficient utilization of resources in V2I communications. To mitigate the problem of incorrect network selection during handover, this study introduces a V2I Multicriteria based Handover Algorithm (mV2I–MHA), considering network parameters such as cost, bandwidth, packet loss ratio, and packet latency. The algorithm’s performance was evaluated using MATLAB R2020a. The obtained results were compared with an existing algorithm where it demonstrated a significant improvement of 27.6% in throughput and a reduction in packet loss rates. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]