TVDR: A Novel Traffic Volume Aware Data Routing Protocol for Vehicular Networks

Recently, the evolution of both wireless communication technologies and vehicular technology have greatly promoted the development of Vehicular Networks (VNs). The VN allows for vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) and vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I) communications using wireless local area network technologies. The distinctive features of their candidate applications (e.g., collision warning and local traffic information for drivers), resources (e.g., computational sources), and their ability to collect various data from their environment (e.g., vehicular traffic flow patterns) make VNs a rich resource for information and resources. However, due to the transient nature of the network topology, data dissemination/content delivery is a challenging task in the VNs. Accordingly, in this article, we investigate the data dissemination/content delivery problem in VNs, and provide a novel traffic volume-aware data routing (TVDR) protocol for VNs. More precisely, by exploring the advantages of the various densities of coexistence vehicular traffic flows, the presented TVDR protocol can derive the data forwarding path with maximum link connection probability for the on-road vehicle. We evaluate the performance of the proposed TVDR protocol by conducting intensive simulations.