Mobility management of unicast services for wireless access in vehicular environments

Wireless Access in Vehicular Environments (WAVE) provides seamless and interoperable services for vehicles. In WAVE, the WAVE Short Message Protocol (WSMP) provides broadcast services but does not define unicast/multicast services that require mobility management to track the locations of the vehicles. To resolve this issue, this article proposes a location estimation-based mobility management mechanism by utilizing positioning systems (e.g., GPS) for a WAVE system deployed in highway environment with a large volume of high-speed vehicles. Performance study indicates that under the same paging cost, our approach can reduce 40-90 percent of the network traffic as compared with the traditional cellular mobility management approach.