Mobility-Aware Interference Avoidance Scheme for Vehicular WLANs

Abstract

Communication technology of future networks is predicted to provide a large variety of services including WiFi service in vehicular network. In this paper, we assume that vehicles are embedded with WiMAX antenna and in-vehicle terminals receive WiMAX traffic through WiFi interface. This assumption will impose severe performance degradation due to interference among mobile BSSs when WiFi access points (APs) are densely located. Existing interference avoidance techniques cannot properly resolve the above problems and do not cope with dynamically moving vehicular scenario since they focus only on the fixed network topology. In this paper, we propose a mobility-aware interference avoidance scheme for WiFi services. The proposed scheme computes the interference duration by exploiting mobility vector and location information of neighboring APs. If the interference duration is not negligible, our scheme searches for another channel in order to avoid interference. However, if the interference duration is negligible, our scheme continues to use the channel to reduce switching overhead. To measure the effectiveness of the proposed scheme against other existing techniques, we evaluated performance by using OPNET simulator. Through the simulation, we obtained about 60% reduction in the maximum interference frequency and about 67% improvement in throughput. Furthermore, our scheme provides fair channel usage.