An efficient routing protocol for connecting vehicular networks to the Internet

Vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) enable vehicles to communicate with each other (V2V) as well as with roadside infrastructure units (V2I). These units provide different services such as driver information systems and Internet access. The high speed and high mobility of vehicles make it very challenging to establish and maintain a connection to these units. We introduce a new protocol which uses the characteristics of vehicle movements to predict the future behavior of vehicles, and to select a route with the longest lifetime to connect to the wired network. The proposed protocol aims at spreading the advertisement messages through multi-hops without flooding the network and performing seamless handovers. The proposed protocol is simulated by considering mobility scenarios, generated by the MOVE tool, in the ns-2 simulator tool. The simulation results show that the proposed scheme increases the packet delivery ratio and decreases the packet delay and overhead.