Load-aware association with AP for internet-connected vehicles

For connected vehicles, vehicle ad-hoc network is capable to support various communication-based applications. Specially, WLAN-based vehicular Internet access can be a complementary and cost-effective solution considering the cost of cellular service. For WLAN-based Internet connected vehicles, we propose an efficient load-aware association mechanism which allocates vehicles to roadside APs properly, and eliminates the unnecessary steps during scanning phase. We defined the load condition as a set of parameters, relative priority of parameters, and determined decision weights in order to select one AP for each vehicle. We evaluated the performance of the proposed mechanism, comparing with the strongest-RSSI-first selection for AP. Depending on the traffic volume, the proposed mechanism showed better performance in the average throughput ratio by about 20%.