Load Balancing and QoS-Aware Network Selection
Scheme in Heterogeneous Vehicular Networks
Noura Aljeri and Azzedine Boukerche
PARADISE Research Laboratory, EECS, University of Ottawa, Canada
nalje094@uottawa.ca, boukerch@site.uottawa.ca
Abstract—With the increasing demands for various wireless
communication technologies and standards, new challenges arise
in seamless connectivity among different techniques. Mobility
management protocols face a new difficulty in vehicular net-
work heterogeneity, from deployment issues to optimal handover
management process. However, due to the dynamic environment
in vehicular networks, providing the best quality of service is
a critical issue. Additionally, conventional mobility management
solutions do not consider user’s preferences when selecting the
next points of access. In this paper, we present a load balancing
and QoS-aware handover scheme in Heterogeneous Vehicular
Networks (Het-VeNET) in order to choose the least loaded
network, while maintaining the high level of required quality of
service. We define the vehicle’s mobility and QoS measurements
and demonstrate the stated handover process in a vehicular
environment. The proposed scheme performance showed a higher
rate of successful handoff and load balance on different cells and
scenarios when compared to benchmark schemes.
Index Terms—Mobility Management, Handover, QoS, Load
balance, Heterogeneous Vehicular networks
I. I NTRODUCTION
Over the past few years, we have witnessed significant
growth in wireless communication technologies; each offers
an additional contribution to the current standards from low-
latency to increased bandwidth availability, referred to as
Heterogeneous Networks [1]. In the context of vehicular
networks, providing vehicles with a variety of access tech-
nologies to support real-time applications and services is a
promising architecture for the current advances in vehicular
technologies. From autonomous driving to traffic monitoring
and safety applications [2], all of which require efficient and
reliable communications to deliver content information in a
vehicular environment. However, network heterogeneity comes
with a drawback in mobility management between different
interfaces.
Mobility management is concerned with two essential as-
pects, handover and location management protocols [3]. The
later tracks and update the vehicles’ location, while handover
management provides seamless mobility to vehicles when
transferring communication links between two points of ac-
cess. However, with the vehicles’ rapid movement and network
topology changes, providing smooth handover is a challenge,
especially in heterogeneous vehicular networks (Het-VeNET).
This paper is partially supported by NSERC, CREATE TRANSIT, and
Canada Research Chairs.
978-1-7281-5089-5/20/$31.00 ©2020 IEEE
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Henceforth, an efficient handover scheme is necessitated to
mitigate the vehicle’s mobility and network conditions to en-
hance the handover method. In general, the handover process
is done in three main steps: Network discovery, Handover
trigger, and Network selection [3]. The most common trigger-
ing condition is the received signal strength (RSS) threshold
value [4], which is the amount of power transmitted by a given
cell, and the selection of the next network is based on the
best-offered RSS value among neighboring cells. Nevertheless,
this will lead to network congestion, as vehicles will always
access the maximum offered SINR by nearby cells. Also, the
dependence on one signal feature in selecting the next access
point is not a realistic approach, as it does not consider the
required service quality nor the vehicle’s mobility projections
and network load.
In this paper, we propose a network selection scheme
for heterogeneous vehicular networks to handle the handover
process and consider QoS parameters while guaranteeing
a balanced load on the network cells. We first define the
vehicle’s mobility and QoS measurements to be included in the
mobility management process, in which vehicles and access
points contribute to providing the available QoS on cells and
preferred quality of service by users. Furthermore, a new
handover trigger is added to the protocol that does not rely on
the signal strength only but also considers current cell service
quality and the surrounding neighbors’ proximity to initiate
the handover process. Thus, the proposed scheme guarantees
users preferred QoS while maintaining a balanced network.
The rest of the paper is organized as follows. In Sec-
tion II, we discuss the related works of mobility management
schemes in vehicular networks. The proposed network model
and measurement functions are derived in Section III. In
Section IV, we present and describe the proposed mobility
handover management protocol in each phase. This is followed
by the simulation experiments and performance evaluation of
our model in Section V. We conclude our work and future
direction in Section VI.
II. BACKGROUND
A heterogeneous network offers several wireless access
technologies and sometimes different types of macro and
small cells with varying ranges of coverage. Vehicular net-
work communications are usually classified into two main
types: vehicle to vehicle (V2V) communications and vehicle
to infrastructure (V2I) communications [5]. Recently, new
additional types are introduced, including vehicle to network
(V2N), and vehicle to pedestrian (V2P), all under the umbrella
of V2X communication standards. In this work, we are more
focused on V2I communication standards. The most common
communication standard for vehicular communication is the
Dedicated Short-Range Communication (DSRC), also known
as IEEE802.11p [6], introduced by the IETF group. However,
the advances of vehicular applications and services come as a
shortcoming for DSRC moderate latency and short-range.
The DSRC protocol is the standard for vehicular communi-
cation, but many research studies examined the use of cellular
technologies, such as LTE-Advanced, to support vehicular
network applications [7]. Since the new trend of wireless net-
work architecture includes various radio access technologies,
a standard interface is needed to carry communication and
transition between them. The IETF group introduced a mobil-
ity management solution, named Media Independent Handover
(MIH), referred to as IEEE802.21 [8], to provide seamless
mobility between RATs. The MIH interface defines two main
entities, Point of Service (PoS) and Point of Attachments
(PoA’s). The later holds a set of available access technologies
in the network, while the former maintains communication
between the network and vehicles. Three primary services
exist in the MIH interface, namely Event service, Command
service, and Information service [9].
Most of the related work studies addressed issues with the
handover process through each phase, the handover trigger,
and network selection. Omheni et al. [10] proposed a vertical
handoff protocol that monitors the communication link’s signal
strength quality using two threshold values. The received
signal strength (RSS) is defined as the amount of power from
a received signal. However, a single point of measurement
may cause handover failures if not correctly estimated. Other
studies use Intelligent and fuzzy-based solutions that may
require a considerable amount of time for computations.
The network selection methods can be categorized into
multiple attributes decision, intelligence-based, and function-
based [11]. The multiple attributes decision making considers
various characteristics from either the network or terminal
devices, such as cell coverage, cost, load, latency, user pref-
erences, or application requirements. Ndashimye et al. [12]
proposed a fuzzy-logic network selection scheme for V2I
communications. A self-evaluating strategy is used by vehicles
to estimate the best available network. Each vehicle measures
the dwelling time of cells using their location and direction
to choose the best option. However, their work does not
take into account any QoS parameters and users’ preferences.
Some research studies investigated handover management in
terms of energy efficiency. A proposal by Nguyen et al. [13],
presented an energy-function based network selection scheme
for heterogeneous networks. The selection strategy is based on
the terminal user and using several measurements to derive a
decision such as power consumption gain and link quality.
Furthermore, a vertical handoff decision scheme proposed
in [14], which is based on a decision tree model. They use
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movement trend and signal strength, among other parameters,
to derive a network selection. However, not many works
consider user preferences and network load parameters in their
decision making.
III. N ETWORK M ODEL
In our model, we consider a vehicular network comprised
of different Radio Access Technologies (RATs) such as LTE,
WiMAX, and WiFi. The mobile terminals’ ability to switch
between different RATs is called the vertical handover pro-
cess [15]. Vehicles and cells use the standard interface card
MIH to facilitate the transitions between different access
technologies. The vertical handover process is considered
expensive and usually suffers from long and hard handover
delays, in which vehicles drops communication link between
itself and the current access point then initiate the next
handover process. Therefore, data links are disrupted, and
packets are lost until a new connection is established. These
issues have led many researchers to consider other alternatives
to facilitate and provide a seamless handover process between
different technologies [16].
A. Problem Definition
In vehicular networks, it is essential to select the most
suitable network among the available wireless access technolo-
gies such as WiFi, Cellular, or WiMAX. The selection of the
network should take into account several metrics to provide
the optimal performance, including user preference, available
bandwidth, and network load. In a conventional handover, ve-
hicles will always choose the best available service regardless
of their velocity nor preferences. Many solutions worked on
enhancing the selection process by including vehicles’ trajec-
tory, speed, and distance to access point. However, selecting
the best-desired quality of service among multiple cells while
maintaining balance load on access points is yet to be fully
explored.
The general process of any handover scheme involves three
main steps, discovery, trigger, and network selection. Several
scenarios in which the handover process may fail and cause
either ping-pong effect or link failure [17]. The handover
trigger may be too early, or too late. If the handover is
triggered too early, then resources will be allocated too soon,
and the vehicle does not connect to the target cell. If its
too late, the handover will not be completed by the time
the vehicle leaves the current serving cell, and service will
be disrupted until the transfer is completed. Timely triggered
handover does affect the overall performance of the handover
process. In our scheme, we trigger the handover process when
the vehicle estimated link duration time with the current access
points exceeds a specific threshold value. Assuming that the
vehicle desired QoS will remain the same throughout the
simulation time.
As for the network selection, any parameters are involved
in the decision making of the selection process, either from
the network measurements (RSS, SINR, bandwidth, data rate,
cost, etc.) or from the user measurements (velocity, location,
 Fig. 1: Heterogeneous Vehicular Networks Scenarios.
and battery power, and preference) or both. However, relying
entirely on the network measurements may lead to network
congestion, as the selection will always be to access the best
cell (i.e., Always Best Connection (ABC) concept). Taking
into account the user preferences and the load balance on cells
is a necessity to overcome the drawbacks of conventional han-
dover decision schemes. In Figure 1, we demonstrate several
scenarios in which a vehicle may be facing in heterogeneous
vehicular networks. Generally, vehicles that are moving in a
relatively high-speed are better to be connected with broad
range cells, named macrocells, and vehicles that are parking or
moving in low-speed are connected with smallcells. The use of
smallcells will help in offloading traffic load from macrocells,
in addition to being within close proximity to vehicles to
provide more reliable services. Nonetheless, in some cases,
vehicles are looking for a specific quality of services among
available cells, as seen in Figure 1 second scenario. In such
cases, the decision making will consider not only the vehicle’s
mobility but also the cell’s available quality of service that
meets the users’ preferred options. In later sections, we discuss
the type of quality of services that can be measured in the
network cell and terminal devices. Furthermore, in many cases,
using the QoS measurements may cause network congestion
when many handover requests are going toward the same
access point.
B. Mobility Measurements
Each cell periodically transmits a broadcast packet to ad-
vertise itself and its available services. Vehicles maintain a
neighboring list of every cell in its proximity, which contains
the cell id, location, available bandwidth, cost, advertisement
timer, and load capacity. The mobility of vehicles is an
essential factor in the network selection process, especially
in Het-VeNET. Therefore, we set the mobility attributes as
the first set of measurements that need to be considered when
the handover process is triggered. According to the vehicles’
velocity, direction, and location, the decision process will start
eliminating the undesirable access points in its neighborhood.
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Working on the same previously described analogy, in which
small-cells are not to be considered when the vehicles’ mobil-
ity is high unless there are no other options in its proximity.
The direction and distance of vehicles will determine the
eligible access points that can provide the vehicle with a
reasonable residual time in its range, assuming the vehicle
will maintain its direction and speed using the link duration
time estimation as follows
R − |dist(xi , aj )|
LDT = (1)
vi
where dist(.) is the euclidean distance between the vehicle xi
and an access point aj , R is the communication range of the
access point, and v is the current velocity of the vehicle.
After that, a list of the possible points of connection that
guarantees a duration time above λ is generated. Assuming
that more than one access point option is present for the
vehicle, the next selection strategy will be based on the user
preference for the Quality of Service.
C. QoS Measurements
The handover process is usually triggered because of three
main reasons: i) to reduce the load on macrocells; ii) a vehicle
is seeking for a better QoS in terms of cost or bandwidth; iii)
or a vehicle is on the border of the current serving cell’s
communication range and requires a new registration. The
selection mechanism of a desired quality of service cell works
as follows. Each cell is set with a QoS parameter and vehicles
that search for point of access to switch to, for a better QoS
in term of cost, latency, or bandwidth are the triggers for the
handover process. The vehicle defines its preferences through
desired throughput, delay, and loss.
We define the QoS vector to include several parameters in
both vehicles and access points. The vehicle’s QoS vector
maintains the user preferences in terms of the minimum
bandwidth and its weight value β. Each access point will
also maintain its QoS vector with the available bandwidth and
usage cost, which is shared with vehicles in its communication
Algorithm 1 Network Selection Method points in their proximity. The list will be periodically updated,
Require: B, (c) ,Listn , cAP and the past lifetime advertisement will be deleted. If a
1: procedure H ANDOVER T RIGGER cell’s entry already exists in the list, then it will be updated
2: while Every T time do accordingly. Similarly, each cell maintains a list of the vehicles
3: Update vehicle’s link duration time LDT with cAP
4: Get cAP RSSI
connected to it during a specific time, this help determines the
5: if LDT < thresh1 or RSSI < thresh2 then cell’s load. The early discovery of nearby cells is essential to
6: Select Network() reduce the amount of time in which the vehicle is required to
7: end if make a decision.
8: end while
9: end procedure B. Handover Trigger Phase
10: procedure S ELECT N ETWORK
11: Eliminate undesired APs from Listn As mentioned in earlier sections, the handover trigger is
12: New short list L initiated due to the vehicle’s losing signal strength from the
13: get vehicle’s QoS vector (B, β) current serving cell and requires a new connection. The time
14: for each AP in L calculate Eq (2) of trigger is crucial to avoid any handover failure or ping-
15: get maximum APi function value
16: if APi == cAP then
pong events. In our method, each vehicle will periodically
17: continue measure the link duration time and the received signal strength
18: else between itself and the current serving cell. If the estimated
19: Start handover process with APi link duration time is below a specific threshold value or the
20: end if signal strength weakens below another threshold value, then
21: end procedure
the handover initiation is triggered, and the vehicle will begin
selecting the next cell and execute the handover process. In
another situation, if the vehicle was not able to find the desired
range. According to the desired QoS and the available set of level of QoS from the current AP’s region, then the handover
access point’s information with the vehicle, an AP selection process can be triggered if such a cell is available.
can be determined by the total QoS function as follows
C. Network Selection Phase
(b, c) = β(b) − (1 − β)(c) (2)
The important aspect of our proposed scheme, is the net-
where (b) is the bandwidth function, (c) is the cost work selection strategy, using the neighboring cell’s table, a
function, and β is the weight value on the access point’s vehicle will start the selection process according to the derive
bandwidth between 0 ≤ 1. The bandwidth and cost functions QoS attributes mentioned earlier in Equation (2). The selection
are calculated by of networks involves the vehicles desired QoS preference
 and the available cells’ QoS states. After a handover trigger
1 if b ≥ B
(b) = is initiated, vehicles will need to find another alternative
0 if b < B before they lose communication with its current AP. Each
where B is the user minimum bandwidth preference. There- vehicle maintains a list of neighboring access points that have
fore, the QoS function of each available access point can be been collected either by listening to broadcast messages from
derived by the previous equation to determine the highest nearby access points or by sending a solicitation message to
access point’s function value for the vehicle to connect to, request information.
in alignment with their desired preference. The network selection method presented in Algorithm 1, in
which an elimination process will first begin by removing the
IV. T HE PROPOSED L OAD BALANCING AND Q O S- AWARE undesired access points using the vehicle’s current mobility
N ETWORK S ELECTION S CHEME measurements. If the vehicle exhibits a high-speed mobility
The main goal of our proposed scheme is to select the least trend, then smallcells will not be used in the selection process,
loaded access point while maintaining a high level of service with the assumption that vehicles will always be presented
quality. The handover process can be described in three phases, with at least one macrocell and one smallcell. In another case,
network discovery, handover initiation, and network selection. vehicles with low-speed mobility are preferred to use small-
In the following, we define each stage separately according to cells unless the desired QoS is not available in nearby small-
our proposed solution. cells; therefore, macrocells will be considered the alternative.
A new shortlist is established, with each cell assigned a QoS
A. Network Discovery Phase value according to the derived QoS equation and the user’s
Each cell or Access Point (AP) will periodically send preference vector. Then, select the best access point’s state
advertisement messages to nearby vehicles. An advertisement among all to be the chosen network for handover. However,
packet contains the cell’s ID, cell’s location, QoS vector in case there is more than one access point with the desired
(i.e., available bandwidth and cost), ads lifetime, and average QoS value, a load balancing mechanism is initiated to select
network load. Upon receiving the AP advertisement message, the least loaded cell. Therefore, maintaining a distributed data
vehicles will retain a neighboring list of the available access load among access points in an area.

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Fig. 2: Ottawa Urban environment map.
TABLE I: Simulation parameters.
Parmeter name Parameter value
Network cells smallcells / macrocells
Number of cells 3 smallcells - 2 macrocells
Transmission range (m) 250 / 1000
Number of vehicles 100
Simulation environment Urban
Simulation time (s) 500
V. P ERFORMANCE E VALUATION
In this section, we present the performance evaluation
of our protocol compared to the benchmark Mobile IPv6
protocol. The simulation of infrastructure-based heterogeneous
vehicular networks is done in NS-2. We use SUMO generated
mobility traces of Ottawa’s urban scenario, as illustrated in
Figure 2, to evaluate the proposed scheme. In Table I, we
summarize our simulation parameters, with macrocells and
smallcells that provide a transmission range of 250m and
1000m, respectively.
To evaluate our proposed load balancing and QoS-aware
handover scheme, we tested the handover scheme in various
cases. In our set of tests, we assume that only 20% of vehicles
require specific QoS for their connection according to the
application being used on the vehicle. We gathered the results
after several runs with an average of 95% confidence interval.
The evaluation is based on several metrics, including the
following
• Load on cells: measures the average load on each access
point, which is the average number of vehicles that are
being served by a specific cell during a step in time.
• Average packet loss: measures the amount of service
packet over the cumulative number of sent packets.
• Handover latency: defines the total time required to com-
plete the handover process from trigger to completion.
• QoS success rate: measures the number of successful
handovers between vehicles and the desired QoS over
the total number of handoffs.
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In Figure 3a, an illustration of the average number of
successful handovers that satisfies the user’s QoS preferences
over the simulation time has shown the high accuracy rate
of the proposed scheme in comparison to the conventional
protocol. It is worth noting that the original protocol satisfies
the required QoS almost 50% of the time when 20% of vehi-
cles request certain Quality of Service, and this is merely ran-
domized depending on the available access points. Figure 3b
portrays the average handover latency of the proposed load-
balancing and QoS-aware handover process and a conventional
RSS-based method over the simulation time. The traditional
and QoS-aware handover schemes both produced resembling
handover latencies with an average of 18ms. This indicates
that the addition of QoS network selection and load balancing
scheme does not affect the performance of the handover
process. Moreover, the handover latency is relatively low and
thus reduces the chances of prolonged service disruption.
In terms of the efficiency of the network selection, we set a
corresponding node to transmit data packets between a service
provider and vehicles and evaluate the data packet’s end-to-
end delay over the simulation time in Figure 3c. The proposed
QoS-based scheme reduces the packet delivery delay in com-
parison to the RSS-based handover management scheme by
an average of 4%. The reason behind the low difference in
reduction is because the simulation setup is relatively small
in size; a more dense network will show the impact of our
load balancing and QoS-aware handover. The network load
in each cell is presented in Figure 4a, with 20% of vehicles
requesting a quality of service that is offered by the smallcells.
The results show more than 60% of the load on one cell
in a conventional handover process. This is due to the fact
that the handover process is always selecting the best cell for
vehicles in terms of received signal value and not considering
the network’s available bandwidth and load. On the other hand,
the proposed protocol has shown a more balanced network
load, which utilizes nearby access points that offers similar
QoS performances.
A comparison in the network load is presented in Figures 4b
and 4c over different percentages of vehicles requesting a
certain quality of service, from 10% to 50% of the vehicles
requesting QoS that is offered by two smallcells AP1 and
AP2 and one macrocell Cell 1. As noticed in Figure 4b,
the conventional handover method increases the load on the
macrocell with an average of 33% of the requests, as the
number of requesting vehicles increase. Comparatively, the
proposed protocol load-balanced mechanism distributes the
load among the other two smallcells with an average of 21% in
both APs and 16% on cell 1. Moreover, the high load on AP3
is due to the central location of the access point, even though
Cell-2 offers the same QoS as AP3. Since our protocol only
balance the load when QoS is established, the load on other
cells was not considered. Also, AP3 attracts more vehicles
when no QoS parameter is introduced or no available access
points in the region that offers the desired quality of service.
 a: QoS success rate. b: HO latency. c: End-to-End delay.
Fig. 3: Comparison between the proposed QoS-aware HO and RSS-based HO/

a: 20% Vehicles request QoS in AP1, AP3. b: QoS-based HO without LB. c: LBQoS-based HO.
Fig. 4: Network load over different QoS percentages.

VI. C ONCLUSION
Heterogeneous vehicular networks ensure high-performance
efficiency to vehicular applications and services. However,
providing end-users with seamless mobility over various ac-
cess technologies is a challenging task. In this paper, we
proposed an efficient load balancing and QoS-aware handover
scheme for heterogeneous vehicular networks. Our proposed
protocol succeeds in balancing the load between the different
wireless access technologies in comparison to the conventional
handover scheme. Moreover, it guaranteed the vehicles’ QoS
requirements and distributed load among network entities
while showed lower packet delivery delays. The proposed
scheme was tested on Ottawa urban map and SUMO mobility
traces. In future work, we plan to investigate several mobility
models to evaluate the impact of mobility on the performance
of our protocol.
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