A Novel Traffic Aware Data Routing Protocol in Vehicular Networks

Abstract

Recently, according to people's requirements for safe and congestion-free driving in the public transportation system, the intelligent transportation system (ITS) has been widely concerned. To achieve a safe and time-saving driving experience in ITS, various data sharing methods are proposed to provide traffic information for drivers to perceive their surrounding driving environment. However, the high dynamic characteristic of the vehicular network (VNET) results in a challenging environment for establishing stable communication among vehicles.

To face this challenge, a Cellular network-assisted Reliable Traffic-Aware Routing protocol (CRTAR) is proposed in this thesis to provide support for vehicle’s data routing process in a heterogeneous vehicular-cellular network environment. In the method, city-wide traffic information, i.e., traffic density and data transmission density of the road segments, is introduced into vehicle's data routing process to assist the vehicle in selecting the optimal data transmission route to deliver data packets. To further improve the stability of inter-vehicle communication, the link lifetime between vehicles is also considered to select the next forwarder that can establish relatively robust communication. CRTAR takes advantage of the reliability and low-latency features of the communication technology in the cellular network and combines the cellular network with VNET to achieve real-time and reliable Vehicle-to-Infrastructure (V2I) communication. Meanwhile, it realizes the Vehicle-to-Vehicle (V2V) communication by the Dedicated Short Range Communication (DSRC) to mitigate the overload of backbone resources caused by using the cellular network.

To be specific, in the method, vehicles can request city-wide traffic information via the cellular network from a cloud service that is connected to the remote data center located in the traffic management agency without latency. According to the real-time traffic information, the source vehicle can execute the data routing process with a global view of the system to calculate the data transmission route that has sufficient transmission resources to the target vehicle. The source vehicle then transmits data to the target via the vehicles in the calculated transmission route. During the forwarding process, vehicles prefer to forward the data packet to the next vehicle with a longer link lifetime. Furthermore, effective backup and recovery strategies are designed for route maintenance. The effectiveness of CRTAR is further verified by conducting simulation experiments.