Mobility and Network Selection in Heterogeneous Wireless Networks: User Approach and Implementation

The Intelligent Transport Systems (ITS) wireless infrastructure needs to support various safety and non-safety services for both autonomous and non-autonomous vehicles. The existing wireless infrastructures can already be used for communicating with different mobile entities at various monetary costs. A packet scheduler, included in a shim layer between the network layer and the medium access (MAC) layer, which is able to schedule packets between uncoordinated Radio Access Technologies ( RATs ) without modification of the wireless standards, has been devised and its performance evaluated. In this paper, we focus on the influence of mobility type in heterogeneous wireless networks. Three cases are considered based on the mobility in the city: walking, cycling, and driving. Realistic simulations are performed by generating mobility traces of Oxford from Google Maps and overlaying the real locations of existing WiFi Access Points.  Results demonstrate that the shim layer approach can accommodate different user profiles and can be a useful abstraction to support Intelligent Transport Systems where there is no coordination between different wireless operators.