Adaptive routing protocol for urban vehicular networks to support sellers and buyers on wheels

Marketing on wheels is an emerging area of research, where users can buy or sell items using inter vehicular communication and web is not required. For quicker delivery of items, the communication between the vehicles should be faster. In this paper, a routing protocol is proposed for urban vehicular ad hoc network (VANET) to send the messages from the buyer to the seller or vice versa in a minimum time to get faster service. Currently, many routing protocols are proposed for urban environment, which are based on the methods of shortest path, high density, minimum packet forwarding delay, and intermediate junction selection. However, these protocols lack knowledge about the communication gaps generated between the junctions before forwarding the data. In this method, the RSU at the junction calculates a path value for each path to choose the next path. The parameters used for path value calculation are number of network fragments between the junctions, delay to send the data from to other junction, and destination closeness. Then, the path which has a less path value is chosen as the next path. Results show that proposed protocol performs better than the existing city based routing protocols in terms of delay, number of network fragments or gaps encountered, path length, total service time, and packet delivery ratio. At last, the proposed routing protocol is validated by conducting an experiment in a small VANET platform designed in an indoor laboratory environment (https://www.youtube.comiwatch ?v=H3Umg15AAH0). Crown Copyright (C) 2018 Published by Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.