Distributed Real-Time Data Traffic Statistics Assisted Routing Protocol for Vehicular Networks

A Vehicular Ad Hoc Network (VANET) not only experiences highly mobile and frequently disconnected, but may also have to deal with rapid changes of network topologies, especially when accidents and road traffic jams happen. In this paper, we propose a novel approach to address this issue. Due to the intermittent connectivity in VANET, we adopt the idea of carry and forward, where a moving vehicle carries the message until forwarding the message to a new vehicle. Different from existing carry and forward solutions in VANET, we make use of the distributed real-time evaluations of data traffic statistics of all roads for each vehicle. Based on the evaluation of current message delivery delay along each road, each vehicle can find the routing path to forward the message to reduce the delay. We propose a distributed real-time data traffic statistics assisted routing protocol (DRTAR) to forward the message to the appropriate road. Experimental results show that the proposed DRTAR protocol outperforms other solutions.