Lightweight intersection-based traffic aware routing in Urban vehicular networks

One of the important characteristics of VANETs is the multi-hop communications, which provides Vehicle-to-Vehicle(V2V) communication for many applications. In order to adapt to mobility in high speeds and limited-time communication links, traffic aware routing was proposed in many research works. As a type of position based routing protocols, traffic aware routing utilizes vehicles’ positions and traffic status as two main routing parameters. However, providing real-time measurements for traffic status on each road generates high network overhead. In addition, to make such measurement always updated and available for routing purposes, the measurement process has to be applied frequently. This paper introduces a Lightweight Intersection-based Traffic Aware Routing (LITAR) protocol for V2V communication in urban vehicular networks. LITAR introduces two new algorithms to reduce the network overhead generated by the traffic status measurement process while preserving the accuracy of measurement. Moreover, LITAR make routing decisions based on vehicular directional density, Road Network Connectivity (RNC) and distance towards destination. The evaluation of the proposed LITAR protocol shows significant performance improvements in terms of packet delivery ratio, while reducing communication overhead as compared to existing routing approaches.