CRUV: Connectivity-based traffic density aware routing using UAVs for VANets

The advent of commercial drones or unmanned areal vehicles (UAV) is expected to facilitate the deployment of a plethora of UAV-based applications. As a result, we expect UAVs to cooperate in ad hoc fashion and joint existing vehicular ad hoc networks. In this paper, we propose a novel routing scheme for Vehicular Ad hoc Networks (VANets) by using unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) through cooperative and collaborative communication. Our approach is based on information exchange between vehicles and UAVs to help vehicles in the ground find the best multi-hop path by selecting the most appropriate next intersection to deliver the data packets successfully to their destinations. We use the real time traffic variation which is estimated with a completely distributed manner based on the periodic exchange of Hello messages between all vehicles and UAVs in the system. In this work, we aim at integrating UAV-to-Vehicle (U2V) and Vehicle-to-UAV (V2U) communications to make routing in the presence of UAVs more efficient and more reliable, and to ensure packet delivery with a minimum of packet losses. This protocol is beneficial to develop more intelligent connected nodes in the future.