Design and Analysis for Dual Connectivity and Raptor Codes Assisted Handover in Vehicular Networks

A salient feature of the vehicular networks is the high mobility of the vehicles, which makes it a challenging issue to provide seamless handover using the conventional dedicated short range communication (DSRC) or cellular network technologies (e.g., 3G/4G). In this paper, we consider the adoption of the dual connectivity (DC) architecture in the vehicular network, which allows the user equipment (UE) to connect simultaneously to a master eNB(MeNB) and a secondary eNB(SeNB), and thus simplifies the signaling and provides enhanced mobility support. To further improve the performance, we propose a raptor codes based dual connectivity (RCDC) scheme, which can effectively address the out-of-order packet delivery problem in the DC scheme, and the coordination between the MeNB and SeNB is significantly reduced. We develop queueing models to characterize the delay performance of the DC and the RCDC schemes by taking into account the handover events in vehicular networks. Simulation results are provided to illustrate the performance of these two schemes under different vehicular network settings, which can prove that the RCDC scheme is more adaptable for the vehicle network with handover events.