VDNet: an infrastructure-less UAV-assisted sparse VANET system with vehicle location prediction

Vehicular Ad Hoc Network (VANET) has been a hot topic in the past few years. Compared with vehicular networks where vehicles are densely distributed, sparse VANET have more realistic significance. The first challenge of a sparse VANET system is that the network suffers from frequent disconnections. The second challenge is to adapt the transmission route to the dynamic mobility pattern of the vehicles. Also, some infrastructural requirements are hard to meet when deploying a VANET widely. Facing these challenges, we devise an infrastructure-less unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) assisted VANET system called Vehicle-Drone hybrid vehicular ad hoc Network (VDNet), which utilizes UAVs, particularly quadrotor drones, to boost vehicle-to-vehicle data message transmission under instructions conducted by our distributed vehicle location prediction algorithm. VDNet takes the geographic information into consideration. Vehicles in VDNet observe the location information of other vehicles to construct a transmission route and predict the location of a destination vehicle. Some vehicles in VDNet equips an on-board UAV, which can deliver data message directly to destination, relay messages in a multi-hop route, and collect location information while flying above the traffic. The performance evaluation shows that VDNet achieves high efficiency and low end-to-end delay with controlled communication overhead. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.