Hybrid Virtual Router and Mesh Networks: A Cost Effective Strategy for Road Tunnels

In order to construct the highway networks, the road tunnels become an inevitable deign to accommodate physical environment elements (e.g., mountains and rivers) in the world. For the recent constructed tunnels, the communication system within the tunnel is planed and designed ahead of time. However, the cost to build and maintain a complete communication system for existing tunnels may not be a cost effective solution. In addition, the mobility is another challenge. Vehicles travel in a tunnel usually at higher speed compare to in a metropolitan area where speed is limited at lower velocity. In an existing proposed communication protocol, called Connectionless Approach for vehicular network, provided a robust solution to high mobility environment. However, the proposed solution relied on location information provided by GPS which is not available inside a tunnel. In this paper, we present a hybrid network called Virtual Router (VR)-Mesh Network. This hybrid network can reduce the number of access points (i.e., mesh nodes) needed without decrease the performance of the network. For this, we proposed a new routing protocol for the VR-Mesh network which does not require location information. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed system in our simulation studies.