Congestion-Aware Geocast Routing in Vehicular Delay-Tolerant Networks

Vehicular Delay-Tolerant Networks (VDTNs) are networks of vehicles that communicate wirelessly, where there are no permanent end-to-end connections. VDTNs have a highly variable topology, with frequent partitions, and possibly low node density. Thus, delay-tolerant routing adopts a store-carry-and-forward message transfer paradigm, where messages have a useful Time-To-Live (TTL) and are stored until a good contact opportunity arises. Multiple message replicas can be generated to improve delivery probability at the cost of increasing network congestion. In this paper, we propose the V-GRADIENT geocast routing protocol that monitors node density, buffer occupancy, and interest in geocast groups, to adapt the forwarding techniques used dynamically, to disseminate messages within the geographic region of interest. Simulation results show that the V-GRADIENT is capable of controlling network congestion and efficiently delivering messages resulting in better delivery ratios, lower latencies, and a small increase in overhead when compared with existing protocols.