Road Based Mobility with Network Information Services

Increasing traffic demand and mobility pose many challenges for wireless networks. Lack of sufficient wireless resources and attempts to fix the problem by equipping networks with more small cell base stations challenge mobility managers. Network information services have been widely cited to help mobile users and networks cope with increasingly dense heterogeneous network environment. In this paper, an information service enhanced with information about base station coverage areas and expected driving routes of end systems are used as basis to improve mobility. Especially, emergency and other high-priority vehicles with pre-known driving routes could benefit from the proactive selection of base stations and their configuration to guarantee quality of service throughout the traversed path. The results indicate that the demanded quality is likely not met when networks suffer from congestion. Moreover, cell selection based on the known route can decrease the number of handovers even almost by half compared to the traditional algorithm using signal strength measurements as basis for the handover target selection.