Virtual road side units for geo-routing in VANETs

Vehicular networking is the new key context to offload the cellular network of the great amount of contents produced on the move. In this paper, we focus on the exploitation of vehicle-to-vehicle communications to deliver part of the data produced on board to the road side units (RSUs) deployed in the scenario, avoiding, as much as possible, the adoption of the cellular network. Specifically, we propose a novel routing algorithm that is based on the greedy forwarding approach and uses virtual RSUs to overcome the problem of the local minima. The proposed algorithm allows data to be redirected through optimized directions with limited amount of added information. In addition, system optimization can be performed via software and the choice of the RSU positions becomes less critical. The effectiveness of the proposed algorithm is demonstrated through simulations performed using realistic vehicular traces in two European cities, showing that the proposed solution increases the amount of data transmitted through the vehicular networks.