Vehicle-to-Infrastructure Connectivity Improvement Based on Heterogeneous Networks in Intelligent Transportation Systems

Abstract Selecting the right roadside unit (RSU) is an important issue in heterogeneous vehicular networks, especially when vehicles move quickly and link stability matters more than short-term performance peaks. In many existing association methods, decisions are made mainly based on signal strength or instantaneous data rate, which often results in frequent handovers and unstable connections. To address this problem, we propose a quality-of-service-aware RSU association framework that takes into account dwell time, communication delay, and the expected amount of data that can be transmitted during the connection period. The proposed method estimates how long a vehicle is likely to remain within the coverage of each candidate RSU and then selects the most suitable one based on service requirements. Simulation results show that this approach can greatly reduce handovers and improve connection continuity compared with conventional greedy methods. Although this comes with a moderate trade-off in throughput and delay, the overall performance is better suited to dense and highly dynamic vehicular environments.