Mobility support for vehicular networks based on vehicle trees

•This paper proposes the concept of a vehicle tree (VT) and presents the architecture based on VTs is proposed.•Vehicles in VT are configured with a CoA via one addressing operation.•The address binding operations for vehicles in a VT are performed in parallel.•The vehicles in VT perform the L2 handover via one channel scanning operation.

The high speed of vehicles results in frequent mobility handovers which degrade communication quality, so it is significant to reduce the handover latency in a vehicular network. Taking this objective into account, this paper proposes a mobility handover scheme based on vehicle trees. In this scheme, a vehicle tree is made up of a few vehicles and performs the handovers as a unit. Consequently, the vehicles in a vehicle tree can be configured with a care-of address only through one addressing operation, and the address binding operations for these vehicles can be performed in parallel. Moreover, the vehicles in a vehicle tree can perform the link-layer handovers only via one channel scanning operation. The performance of the proposed scheme is evaluated, and the data results show that this scheme can greatly reduce the handover delay.