Breaking the Vehicular Wireless Communications Barriers: Vertical Handover Techniques for Heterogeneous Networks

End users increasingly expect ubiquitous connectivity while on the move. With a variety of wireless access technologies available, we expect to always be connected to the technology that best matches our performance goals and price points. Meanwhile, sophisticated onboard units (OBUs) enable geolocation and complex computation in support of handover. In this paper, we present an overview of vertical handover techniques and propose an algorithm empowered by the IEEE 802.21 standard, which considers the particularities of the vehicular networks (VNs), the surrounding context, the application requirements, the user preferences, and the different available wireless networks [i.e., Wireless Fidelity (Wi-Fi), Worldwide Interoperability for Microwave Access (WiMAX), and Universal Mobile Telecommunications System (UMTS)] to improve users' quality of experience (QoE). Our results demonstrate that our approach, under the considered scenario, is able to meet application requirements while ensuring user preferences are also met.