Road Connectivity-based Routing for Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks

Deploying inter-vehicular applications is a challenging task due to the high mobility and the dynamic topology changes. These characteristics cause frequent network disconnections and drastically reduce the efficiency of traditional ad hoc routing protocols. To address this issue, we introduce a new routing approach called “Road Connectivity-based Routing for VANETs” (RCBR) that improves routing performance by selecting an optimal route with high connectivity. RCBR uses real-time traffic information to build a graph representing a view of city roads and the duration of connection between intersections. The connectivity information collected over each road segment is proactively sent to a server deployed on the roadside infrastructure. Based on this graph, a stable path is selected to forward packets along successions of road intersections with high network connectivity among them. The simulation results for city scenarios show that the proposed protocol outperforms existing routing approaches in term of data delivery ratio with significant reduction in delays. Moreover, RCBR scales very well even for sparse networks.