Group mobility management for vehicular area networks roaming between heterogeneous networks

Due to widespread deployments of Vehicular Area Networks (VANs) and the increasing affordability of mobile data and smart mobile devices, there is an increasing demand for accessing applications and services on-the-go. As a result, group mobility scenarios have emerged, especially over VANs on public transport networks (e.g., buses, trains, aircraft, and so on). Therefore, when a group of users roam as a single unit, the NGMN must be equipped with efficient route optimization and group mobility management support. In light of this, the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) has defined the NEtwork MObility (NEMO) basic support protocol for location transition management for a group of members moving between two networks. Nevertheless, IETF's group mobility management solution is limited to homogeneous networks. Therefore, this paper proposes the integration of NEMO support for NGMN architectures for enabling group mobility management among multiple heterogeneous networks. Further, according to the evaluation and results, it is also capable of successfully handling handoff and mobility management for complex nested mobility scenarios.