Multihomed SIP-based network mobility for the scheduled public transit service.

Network mobility (NEMO) enables a group of nodes to connect to the back-end infrastructure during the movement. Because a vehicle must provide passengers good enough transmission quality, various access techniques, for example, 3G/3.5G, Wi-Fi or dedicated short range communication, can be simultaneously equipped to aggregate bandwidth and tolerate link failure. This paper extends the Session Initiation Protocol (SIP)-based NEMO framework to support multihoming. First, IEEE 802.21 Media Independent Handover (MIH) is integrated to manage multiple egress interfaces in an on-board unit (OBU). Second, a dynamic synchronization mechanism using the SIP SUBSCRIBE and NOTIFY methods is proposed to manage multiple OBUs in a vehicle. Furthermore, the framework is applied to public transportation systems, for example, bus, train, or mass rapid transit. Passengers may need to transit several times during their journeys. The transit behavior must induce a flood of signaling messages for location update. In this paper, the SIP REFER method is exploited to reduce signaling messages while a group of passengers have scheduled their transit in advance. Copyright (c) 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.