iCARII: Intersection-based connectivity aware routing in vehicular networks

Vehicular Ad hoc Network (VANET) has been gaining the attention from the academic and industry communities due to the promising applications in road safety, traffic management and passenger comfort. However, the short vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communication range and the nature of vehicle mobility impose many challenges in packet routing and, accordingly, infrastructure-based applications, e.g., Internet access. For more reliable communication, automobile manufacturers have started the investigation to deploy cellular networks, such as LTE, to support in-car Internet access. In addition to the high communication cost to the end-user, using centric cellular networks for vehicular communication applications causes data explosion and network overload. A feasible solution is using VANETs for mobile data offloading when connectivity to infrastructure is guaranteed, which requires an efficient routing protocol with global connectivity awareness. In this paper, we propose a novel infrastructure-based, dynamic, and connectivity-aware routing protocol, iCARII, to enable infotainment applications and Internet access in an urban environment. iCARII aims to improve VANETs routing performance by enabling selecting roads with guaranteed connectivity and reduced delivery delay. Detailed analysis and simulation-based evaluations of iCARII demonstrate the significant improvement of VANET performance in terms of packet delivery ratio and end-to-end delay with a negligible cost of routing overhead.