Side Information-Aided Handover Strategy for Air-Ground Integrated Vehicular Networks

The development of the internet of things (IoT) and smart cities, combined with the widespread usage of cooperative or independent air traffic surveillance systems such as automatic dependent surveillance-broadcast (ADS-B) bring about novel deployment paradigms in air-ground integrated vehicular networks (AGVN). However, compared with the evolutional physical layer advancing, the communication protocols such as TCP/IP protocol, which are listed on the top of communication protocol stacks, have relatively constricted developments due to their fixed frameworks. The most obvious manifestation of this trend is that these protocols can hardly extend interfaces to maximize the benefits brought by bottom layer upgrades. In view of the above problems, in this paper, we propose a novel handover strategy based on side information of the ADS-B for AGVN. Firstly, a practical scheme of combination between TCP/IP protocol and ADS-B, which is implemented in the Network simulation, version-3 (ns-3), is proposed to adapt the AGVN handover tasks. Secondly, the configuration, timing sequence and parameters, as well as handover strategies of the scheme are proposed in detail with the modules called by ns-3 simulator. Finally, the experimental results are provided to validate the handover strategies.