A Fuzzy Logic-Based Communication Medium Selection for QoS Preservation in Vehicular Networks

Enabling vehicles to connect to the best available communication medium in a heterogeneous network is of high importance to preserve good quality of service (QoS), however a hard task to handle. The ISO-CALM (Communications Access for Land Mobiles) offers the possibility to manage multiple communication interfaces with a promising architecture, but without any specific implementation. Several techniques were proposed to handle the network choice, however, they didn't stick to an open standard and in some cases many important metrics are not considered. We consider in this paper to develop a fuzzy-based framework to select the best communication medium in a heterogeneous vehicular network. The proposed mechanism is based on fuzzy inference systems and considers several features that affect the decision process, which are available from the network such as received signal strength (RSSI), network density, vehicle speed and service cost. The use of fuzzy-logic is motivated by its capability to treat linguistic parameters in a lightweight manner which makes it able to deal with 'ping-pong' problem by reducing the number of vertical handoffs and easy to integrate in real resources-constrained equipments.