A reliable and lightweight opportunistic routing protocol for inter-region data gathering in VSNs

The inter-region interest data gathering service in vehicular sensor networks (VSNs) can help improve the driving safety and efficiency in city. In this paper, based on moving behaviors of vehicles, we divide vehicles into different communities. In a community, the vehicles usually visit similar regions and have higher probabilities to encounter each other. Taking it into account, we propose a reliable and lightweight opportunistic routing (RLOR) protocol for inter-region interest data gathering in VSNs. The RLOR protocol consists of quota-style message replication procedure (MRP) and community-aware message forwarding procedure (MFP). In MRP, one vehicle node sprays its limited message copies to vehicle nodes that have more stable link connections with itself until the left message is one. Furthermore, in MFP the left message copy is forwarded to a vehicle node that belongs to same community with the collector, or an active vehicle node that may encounter more different vehicle nodes. Simulation results show that the RLOR protocol outperforms other popular routing protocols.